Automated Policy Execution - Apply all current and future patches up to policy baseline in single execution

Hi @habrnero,

Thank you for the feedback!

By server outage, do you mean the servers rebooting to complete a patching cycle (where applicable) or patching in general?

As for policy execution, can you elaborate more on this manually executing policies. It will help us understand more of your challenge and how to assist you. I’m also curious to see what this brings up as problems in our product to note that for our roadmap.

Thank you!

Greg

Currently, we schedule ‘patch windows’ where customers are aware that patching will be taking place over ‘x’ hours on ‘y’ day. This time frame is all we have to get servers up to date and aligned with the policy that has been set.

Unfortunately, we’re still working on getting customers to patch more often, so sometimes there are patches that are prerequisites to other patches showing up that don’t appear until after a patch cycle and reboot have occurred. Since this is potentially our only opportunity to get these systems up to date for several months, it’s important for us to try to re-scan and apply any new patches that become relevant during that window as a result of prerequisite patches completing their installation.

This becomes difficult to maintain from a manual perspective as we scale out across many different groups and execution times. As of right now, we’re asking our patching admins to re-execute the policy a second time during that window after it has completed in case any new patches become relevant.

Unfortunately this is a tough problem to solve, given the way Microsoft sets up their cumulative & exclusive patches.

One workaround we’ve suggested in the past is setting up two identical policies, that run at least 30 minutes apart. That way if there’s an exclusive patch then it will rerun the policy after that completes and catch any additional patches that open up, both on the same day when you’re allowed to reboot the servers.

Given your 6 month window, it’s not often that there are two exclusive patches that would happen within that time-frame. But the above workaround should take care of those. Would that work for you?

Thank you again for your feedback, we’ve noted it for the future and please don’t hesitate to reach out with more!

Thanks, Greg! Does this mean you’ve added it to the roadmap, or should I go ahead and suggest it?

We already had this feature in our roadmap for consideration and your feedback/use case has been added to it. Thanks again!