MSP Consultant Tobin Carpenter goes over how to create a report to assist you in easily seeing the Patch Management settings for each machine in your environment. This is extremely useful to ensure each machine is configured for patching correctly and quickly.
Step by Step:
- Today I’m going to go over how to create a report to assist you in easily seeing the patch management configurations for each machine in your environment. This is extremely useful to ensure each machine is configured for patching correctly and quickly let’s do it.
- Let’s go ahead and head to info center and reports you can see I have this report called patch configuration test that I’ve already made.
- But in order to create this report select the folder that you want to created in, select new, and select report the new report window will open.
- Go ahead and name your report.
- Select general and select excel as the report format.
- Head back to the layout tab and we need to add three report parts to this report with each being a table select expand report parts and expand patch.
- We’re going to drag in patch configuration, patch policy member, and patch status by agent.
- Let’s open up patch configuration and from the columns table we’re going to select the following columns: machine id, group name, operating system, windows update automatic windows, automatic update configuration, and reboot action description.
- Select next, next, and finish.
- Then let’s head to patch policy member and select the columns machine ID and policy name.
- Select next, next, and finish.
- And the last one patch status by agent.
- Select the columns machine ID, next scan, scan recurrence auto-update recurrence, and next auto-update.
- Select next, next, and finish.
- Select save.
- And now we need to run our test our report make sure you have the report selected, select run now and what I like to do with this is I like to run it on two different runs one for all servers and one for all workstations that way you can have this information divided so that when you present it to your client it’s orderly.
- So, let’s select the view that you use for all workstations, select submit, allow this a moment to create the report.
- This report can take a little while to create depending on how many agents you have in your environment.
- So, let’s open the report and we’re going to have something that looks a little bit like this.
- So, you’re going to have your patch config top it has your group name, operating system, Windows, automatic update configuration, reboot action description.
- Down a little bit farther you’re going to see our patch policy member section with your policy name.
- And then at the very bottom you’re going to have your patch status by agent with the details that we’ve added there.
- What you want to do or what I do is I create another sheet and I copy all of these details into the other sheet. Then I scroll down to the next section and I copy everything except machine ID.
- I do that for the last two sections, that way you’re not having multiple fields with the machine ID.
- Then I take that information and I format it as a table so that we can now filter the information.
- So, this is what you’ll end up seeing you’ll have something that looks a bit similar to this you can further review this information by adding pivot tables so that you can further filter this information a little easier for it for your clients.
- That’s how you make that report.