Introduction to SolarWinds Patch Manager

Hello, this is Lawrence Garvin, Product Manager, here to talk about SolarWinds Patch Manager, a product that will likely shave weeks off your patch workload. SolarWinds Patch Manager automates the patch management process to help Sysadmins and Security Information Engineers protect systems, networks, and applications against known vulnerabilities, improve application performance, and pass patch compliance audits. Patch Manager is a centralized patch management solution which saves you numerous hours per patch by automatically patching your Windows systems along with a host of other third-party applications. Let's take a quick tour of Patch Manager. In this dashboard level view, you can get a quick glance of security updates that are missing with their severity and the servers and desktops that are up-to-date, missing a patch, or have installation errors. Click on the pie chart, and you get a list of the computers that can be updated. Further drilling down, you can see the top missing updates for the computer, whether any updates are installed but pending reboot, and updates that have had installation failures. This dashboard view leverages the same UI as other SolarWinds products like Network Performance Monitor or Server & Application Monitor, so when you have a performance issue, you can check to see if it is related to a recent patch or an unpatched application. Patch Manager also provides extremely flexible and customizable reports, for reporting on patch status and compliance to known application vulnerabilities for which there is a patch. Reporting with Patch Manager provides value-add for Windows Server Update Services, or WSUS deployments, because with Patch Manager you can report on over 500 fields of data using over 100 report definitions, all of which can be fully customized, scheduled, exported, or emailed with no SQL knowledge required. You can sort, filter, or group reports by patch status, application, WSUS target group, or any other field. To publish patches provided by SolarWinds, another vendor, or a patch which you have customized or created yourself, Patch Manager leverages and extends your existing WSUS server. You can schedule updates per your group policy or maintenance window or force an immediate update on one system, multiple systems, or an entire group of systems. The Package wizard enables you to build custom update packages or deployment to your systems in your environment. If you have a custom application or an application like Java with complicated scenarios, you can use Patch Manager's PackageBoot™ technology to define additional pre and post installation events that are fully integrated with the patch deployment task. When using Configuration Manager 2012, Patch Manager integrates with a console to publish update packages to your software update point. It also provides pre-built and pre-tested packages for common third-party applications which are automatically synchronized with the Patch Manager's server as soon as new updates are ready. Download your free 30-day trial to start saving time and money with SolarWinds Patch Manager. [♪ Music ♪] [© 2012 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All Rights Reserved.] SolarWinds Hello. This is Brandon Shopp, Director of Product Management at SolarWinds here to talk about an exciting new product - SolarWinds Patch Manager. Patch Manager is a centralized patch management solution, which saves you numerous hours by automatically patching your Windows^® systems along with a host of other third-party applications. The acquisition of EminentWare^® and the release of SolarWinds Patch Manager expands our footprint into the systems management market. Let's dive right in and take a closer look at Patch Manager. Patch Manager leverages and extends your existing Windows^® server update service, or WSUS, or your Microsoft^® server configuration and change management deployments. A dashboard-level view, provides you with a global summary of items such as systems-by-operating system version or a usage summary so you can quickly see an overall status of your patch compliance state. From here, you can navigate and view summary level information on any of your WSUS or SCCM servers and further drill into systems associated to that server in order to view current configuration and asset level information. Patch Manager also allows you to manage and update third party applications. Out-of-the-box Patch Manager provides historical third-party application updates, as well as, ongoing updates for many popular vendors, as you can see here. This includes important information about the update and additional documentation, including any prerequisites rules for the this update. If you don't see an application update you're looking for, you can leverage our innovative package boot technology. Package boot uses a wizard enabling you to build update packages for packaging your systems in your environment. Let's walk through creating a package. First I'm going to name this package. [My Package - My Application] I'm going to go ahead and define a few of these fields, such as classification. I'm going to define this as a critical update. What vendor? This is from SolarWinds. What product? This is for our bug-tracking system. And any additional information that is applicable to this update. Next, I can add any prerequisite rules around defining what service to apply this to. Doing this, I can create a basic rule myself, an MSI rule, or use an existing rule that is defined out-of-the-box. So, in this example I'll use an existing rule. I'm going to specify that this is applicable to Windows¨ 2000 SP4 servers or later. Next, I'm going to specify the type of package that I'm creating. In this example, I'm using an EXE. I already have this package downloaded onto my system. I'm going to go ahead and specify where this EXE is located at on my file system. I'm going to next specify in what language. Here we're in English. Go ahead and select NEXT. I just went ahead and downloaded my package into the system. I can now define further applicability rules for pushing this patch to my systems. Next, I can define installed rules, which allows me to describe whether or not the update is installed on this computer or not. Next, I'm going to get a quick summary of what I'm getting ready to do in this package. I've now created this package and have saved it. I can quickly view and deploy to systems within my environment. As you can see, Patch Manager is a must-have for any IT professional. For as little as a few dollars per node, you can quickly and easily manage patching your systems within your environment. But don't just listen to me. For a free 30-day trial, go to SolarWinds.com and try it out for yourself. Thanks. [The SolarWinds and SolarWinds Patch Manager marks are the exclusive property of SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC, are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries.] All other SolarWinds trademarks, service marks, and logos may be common law marks or registered or pending registration in the United States or in other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.] [SolarWinds @2012 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC]