Unified Management. Install, deploy, and update all your Windows, Mac, and 3rd Party software. Comprehensive Visibility. One dashboard shows the complete landscape of patch status in your environment. Scalable Automation. Create default scan and accept, review, reject criteria. Automate using profiles and policies.
The is your home for onboarding, training, new user information, the product knowledge base, and official product documentation. The customer portal is where you can submit a help desk ticket, find all of the information about the products you own, and see available hotfixes and upgrades as well as training opportunities for your products. so that our team of support reps can assist you in getting your patch management software back up and running. to see all of your product information including licenses, renewal dates, downloads and upgrades, and hotfixes.
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Software patching involves the acquisition, testing, and installing of code - known as a patch - into an executable program to provide an update, fix, or improved version of the program or its supporting data. Although software patching is critical for IT security, IT administrators that manage this process can spend an exorbitant amount of time manually applying and tracking patches across an entire IT infrastructure. Many choose, instead, to leverage patch management software to automate this process, not only for software patching, but to patch servers and workstations as well. Patch Manager notifies you of all updates via email and the console window, and extends your existing Microsoft Windows Server Update Service or System Center Configuration Manager environment to publish third-party updates as well.
To simplify the patch process, the patch management software updates are categorized as security, critical, definition, third-party, and service pack updates. You can select the specific Microsoft or third-party update, approve it, and schedule or deploy the update to the select computer group or Active Directory organizational unit (OU). SolarWinds Patch Manager gives you control over the patch process by automating approval processes, shutdowns, reboots, defining the correct pre- and post-installation environment, and creating comprehensive reports. For example, after rolling out a critical security update, you can quickly run a Percent Failed or Percent Not Installed report to assess the patch status.
This enables you to take swift and appropriate action to deal with any failed updates. Security patch management in your WSUS/SCCM environment can become more effective and less time-consuming and error-prone with Patch Manager.
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I'm looking for advice on what patch management solutions you would recommend based upon your experience. I'm also looking for which ones you would not recommend based upon your experience. We have a mixed network of Windows and Mac clients. Our central servers are all Windows servers, although I have considered putting in a Mac server to better handle our Mac clients.
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The issue we are facing currently is that we need to maintain the patches on all of our third-party applications. Right now we use WSUS, which handles with patching of Windows and some Microsoft products but that is about it. I need something to cover the other applications, specifically things like Adobe products (Reader, Flash, Dreamweaver, etc.) Our network isn't that big (maybe 200 clients) and I don't have a person to dedicate just to patching and maintaining a patch management solution. Thus very large and complicated solutions like System Center are most likely out. I have recently been looking at Dell's Kace K1000 solution. It seems simple and it provides a lot of tools in one package that I would like/need as well.
I like the fact that it is self-contained in an appliance and that it is designed for solutions like mine. However, I'm not sure if this is the best solution. I've also looked some at Shavlik's Netchk solution but I don't need an anti-virus product. However, it looks like they might have a very good patch database. My question is this: What are your thoughts on these to products? Are there better products out there?
Are there issues that I'm not considering? I want something that is very good at patching a broad range of products, that is simple to use, that takes a minimal amount of management (like WSUS), and that (hopefully) works with Mac and Windows. You mention having checked out Shavlik Netchk but have you looked at it.shavlik.com. It is their SaaS patch management offering.
The cost for 250 machines is $1500 per year and currently they are offering a 3 year subscription at $2250. We use the Netchk product to do patch management on about 1100 workstations. We are extremely happy with it. It is very easy to setup and maintain.
It really takes very little effort on our part. The patch management engine is great and in fact most other products out there actually license and use the Shavlik engine. Shavlik supports both agentless and agent based scanning. We use a mixture of both. We also use Shavlik on our servers and for the majority if these we do not install the agent. Some servers exist in network segments where the needed ports for agentless can not be opened and for these we do install the agent. On the workstations we use the agent.
Agentless does scans at a frequency you define and if a workstation is disconnected (such as a traveling laptop) or has been shutdown the scan will fail. With the agent the agent does the scan and contacts the server, so it solves this issue. – Jul 1 '11 at 19:52.
Our biggest gripe for the longest time was that it didn't support patching Adobe Air. The latest versions do and the gripe is gone. We are patching a variety of Microsoft products, Acrobat, Flash, AIR, Java, Skype, Firefox, and Safari. That covers 98 - 99% of our apps. The rest we address using another tool. Shavlik could be used to push out custom patches for these but mostly for historic reasons we don't do so.
Occasionally we do hit patching failures on particular machines but they have always been due to an issue on the machine versus any Shavlik issue. – Jul 1 '11 at 20:08.