ConnectWise Automate: Creating Custom Patching Groups

ProVal Tech’s RMM Admin Dylan goes over how to create a custom patching group for a client/location in Automate.

Step-by-Step:

1. Today I’m going to talk about creating custom patching groups in Automate.
2. Custom patching groups are great for clients or locations that need extra attention when it comes to how to patches are deployed.
3. If you have a client with a strict maintenance policy or one that prefer to handling rebooting themselves, you can create a group with policies that fit what they need from you.
4. The first step to creating this is to create a search that we can use to autofill the group we are creating.
5. So we go through Automation, Searches, and Advanced Searches.
6. In this example what we are going to do is create a custom patching group that fills with agents that are located at a specific location or client.
7. So for this search what we want to do is click the plus, change this to computers, client general name, and then enter the client name we want here.
8. Next, we can click search to make sure that this search is working correctly.
9. Next we can click search to make sure that the search is working as intended and you see we have our 12 agents that are located at this client.
10. So next we want to name this search which we can do Patch Install Dev and save it, click ok here now we can go and create our group.
11. To create our group we need to go to this groups tab in the browse because we are using this for patching it would be best if we create this under the patching folder.
12. So if we right-click on patching, and select create group a brand new group will open up for us and the main things we want to pay attention to here are the group information and the auto-join searches.
13. So in group information we will name the group.
14. So similar to this search getting this patch install and then whatever your client name is and you want to make sure that you select grade master. In this master group check box there are three options: non-master, master, and grade master.
15. And for this group we are going to going to want to select grade master.
16. Now for our auto-join search this is going to be the group that we just created which is called Patch Install Dev.
17. We can click this preview/run to get an idea of what’s going to join the group which is exactly the agents that we saw show up in the search and I’ll also note this limit to search checkbox.
18. Checking this will make the group dynamic and that as agents join and leave that location this search will recognize that and if an agent leaves the location it will also be removed from this group because it no longer fits the conditions set in the search.
19. So we are going to check that so that agents leave as they also leave the location.
20. Now that we have that all set we can click create and now we have that group created.
21. Then we need to go into the patch manager click on the configuration button in the top right which brings you here into our Groups configuration.
22. To add this group that we already created we need to click on the Group actions, add existing group, and find our Patch Install Dev Group which will be added to the top.
23. Now because this is a client that we are trying to apply specific policies that deviate from how our default is set we want to make sure that we put this group below all of our default groups and any other groups that will have agents that are in this group.
24. We need to make sure we do that because patch policies are applied based on how groups are ordered in this window the lower, they are the higher the priority they are so if we were to put this group all the way at the bottom the agents in this group will select the policies that are set here. And if the policies are not set they will take the next policy in a group they are in.
25. So in this case let’s say this client has a very strict only Sunday night and Sunday morning patch policy so we can make sure that patches are installed Sunday morning and they do not want to reboot so we can set their reboot policy to do not reboot.
26. That is how you create a custom patching group.