Alerts in Patch Manager

Question

I haven't seen anything myself but I'm wondering if anyone has any knowledge about alerts in Patch Manager. If there isn't would setting up an empty WSUS group and auto approving to that group along with generating an email about the approval work? Any other ideas or practices out there to facilitate this?

LGarvin · Accepted Answer

Patch Manager doesn't have "alerts" in the conventional sense that we think of them; however, it is possible with some creative use of reports, exports, and filtering what is written to the export file, in combination with conditional email notification on the existence of content in the export file. This can create pseusdo-alerts on certain states, but perhaps more valuable -- not just that the state exists, but because of the details in the export file, those machines that are contributing to that state.

As an example, you could create a report that shows all systems reporting an update as Needed, where the update has been Approved for more than a week. In normal operations, most systems should install an update within a week of its approval (actually within a few days, but let's be generous for the sake of the example). If an update is not installed after a week, that's probably something worth alerting on. Generate a report with a list of those systems and send an email with the report attached. If the email is conditional upon data in the report export, an empty report will not generate an email notification.

If it's a question of just getting a notification when new updates are received by the WSUS server ... the core report collection does include a synchronization report, which can be filtered on date and/or the quantity of updates synchronized (e.g. New Updates > 0). Also, of course, the native WSUS server actually has a pretty useful daily sync report built in. Navigate to Options | Notifications in the native console to turn that feature on.