We’re delighted to announce two significant enhancements to Patch Management in the upcoming Dashboard and Agent Release. Very soon, you’ll be able to instruct Patch Management to automatically re-try failed patches, and you’ll be able to schedule the Vulnerability Scan to run at a time you choose: daily, weekly, monthly, or on demand.

Patch Management – Automatically Reprocess Failed Patches

With our next release, you’ll be able to automatically reprocess failed patches, which can significantly reduce the overhead of dealing with patches that failed the first time round, while simultaneously improving the effectiveness of your security protection.

To take advantage of this new feature, go to the Patch Management Settings dialog, available from the Settings menu, then scroll down to see the Failed Patches section – check the box if you want to automatically retry failed patches, and set how many times you want to the system to try, up to a maximum of five attempts.

If the patch still won’t install after the stated number of tries, it will be declared a failed patch and show as such in the Dashboard.

Note that the new option respects your Patch installation schedule, to avoid the system installing patches when you don’t want it to. For example, if patches are set to install every weekday at 10:00am and a patch fails on Monday, then the Dashboard will retry that patch each day at 10:00am until either the patch installs or the maximum number of attempts is reached.

Patch Management – Schedule the Vulnerability Scan (requires RC Agent v10.5.8) 

The next major enhancement to Patch Management is the ability to schedule the Vulnerability Scan, so you control when it runs. Going forward, you’ll be able to set a daily, weekly, monthly or manual schedule for the scan, giving you much more control over this option.

To change the Vulnerability Scan from its current schedule, go to Settings > Patch Management Settings, then go to the new Schedule section:

NB: The Vulnerability Scan schedule requires RC Agent v10.5.8 and above. Devices on older agents will continue to run on the current DSC cycle time. 

Currently the Scan runs at the same time as the Daily Safety Checks: Leave it at this setting or change it to better suit your needs. It means you can now sync the scan schedule with your patch installation schedule, or have it run out of office hours to avoid any performance impact on a user’s computer during the day.

If you set it to manual, then the scan will no longer automatically run, so please be aware that in that state it will no longer report up missing patches. Only use this mode in very specific circumstances. If you set it to manual, then you can manually kickstart the scan by going to a device in the north pane and selecting the ‘Run Vulnerability Scan’ option from the device’s context menu.

Patch Management – Additional Improvements

We’re also busy improving the performance of specific Patch Management areas, based on your feedback. Since the start of the year we’ve implemented a solution to resolve the “Not enough storage is available to complete this operation” error, a common issue reported by a number of customers. We’ve also addressed a problem that was leading to systems reporting back that it wasn’t able to find the specified file. Both updates are live and you should be seeing noticeable improvements in those areas.

These updates and more are part of an ongoing initiative to make Patch Management more performant and effective – we’ll let you know when we have further updates to share. We would also like to remind you of the new Patch Management workflow we introduced last year – if you didn’t yet give this a test drive we certainly recommend you give it a try!

Summary for Dashboard Release
– Patch Management Improvements, improved Physical Disk Health Check
– Dashboard v6.37
– Windows Agent v10.5.6 GA, Windows Agent v10.5.8 RC, Mac Agent 2.1.1 GA

Dashboard v6.37
UPDATE: Set a schedule for Patch Management’s Vulnerability Scan (requires Agent v10.5.8)
UPDATE: Automatically reprocess failed patches

Windows RC Agent v10.5.8
UPDATE: Set a schedule for Patch Management’s Vulnerability Scan

Windows Agent 10.5.6 GA
Agent 10.5.6 includes all the updates since the current production Agent v10.5.4:

Windows Agent 10.5.6 RC
UPDATE: Managed Online Backup renamed “Backup & Recovery”
UPDATE: Upgrade of Managed Online Backup Agent to Agent version 16.11
UPDATE: Add support for Symantec Endpoint Protection v22.7 to the Symantec Antivirus Check
BUGFIX: Ensure definition updates are obtained for ‘Kaspersky Anti-Virus’ in the Antivirus Check
BUGFIX: Better language support for the remote command line option within the Remote Background Management feature
BUGFIX: Resolve issue where SNMP Checks fail every second check cycle
BUGFIX: Resolve issue where command line arguments in quotes were not correctly handled

Windows Agent 10.5.5 RC
UPDATE: Managed Online Backup renamed “Backup & Recovery”
UPDATE: Better language support for the remote command line option within the Remote Background Management feature
BUGFIX: Resolve issue where SNMP Checks fail every second check cycle
BUGFIX: Resolve issue where command line arguments in quotes were not correctly handled

Mac Agent 2.1.1 GA
Mac Agent 2.1.1 includes all the updates since the current production Agent 2.1.0

Mac Agent 2.1.1 RC
BUGFIX: Resolve issue with running script checks
BUGFIX: Resolve issue with script parameter handling