Set up Automated Patch Management With IT Automation

Patch management is a crucial aspect of IT administration. It involves patching security vulnerabilities, eradicating bugs, as well as improving usability and performance by making sure software is up to date. To learn more about how Patch Management works, please see our Patch Management Q & A. Atera's Patch Management gives you total administrative control over all your customers’ patches, from within the platform.

To set up automated Patch Management:

1. From Admin, click on Patch Management and IT Automation.

2. Select Add Profile (bottom, right of the page) to create an IT Automation profile.

3. Enter a name for the profile, and click Apply. The Edit Automation Profile screen appears.

4. Check the boxes of the patches you wish to install and other automations you wish to include.

Categories include:

• OS Patch Management
• Software Patch Management (Software patches are installed via Chocolatey for Windows package manager. Learn more)
• Disk Management
• Maintenance
• Scripts

To install the patches immediately:

Select Execute Now (top of page).

To choose a weekly and/or monthly automation schedule:

a. After selecting the patches you wish to install, click on Weekly or Monthly (top of page).

b. Then click the  icon, and set your desired schedule.

c. Click Apply.

Note: If you wish to schedule the automated Reboot or Shutdown (under Maintenance), we strongly recommend creating separate automation profile for these, as they may disrupt other selected actions on a profile.

5.  You can exclude certain patches. It can be used for excluding problematic patches after trying them out on a demo or test environment for several days. For more information, refer to the section, How Can I Exclude Patches From The Automation Profile

6. Optionally, you can add email addresses (technician's/customer's) to receive detailed reports of patch installation success (or failure), each time, after an automation runs.  

7. Select Save to save your newly created automation profile.

Note: Patch automation will run at the local time of the device location.

8. Assign the profile to your customer(s) or a specific Agent. See: Assign an IT Automation Profile to your Customer(s) or an Agent (below).

Assign an IT Automation Profile to your Customer(s) or an Agent

Once you have created an IT Automation profile, you'll need to assign it to your customer(s) or a specific agent.

To assign an IT automation profile to an Agent:

1. Click on an Agent. The Agent screen appears.

2. Under Profiles > IT Automation profile, click Manage. The Select IT Automation Profile dialog box appears.

3. Select the IT automation profile from the Attach new Profile drop down menu, and click Apply. The automation profile is now assigned to the Agent.

To assign an IT automation profile to your customer(s) or multiple agents:

1. Click on Devices. The devices page appears.

2. Check the box(s) to select all your agents, or specific agents.

3. Click on the    (Assign IT Automation Profile) icon above.

4. Select the IT automation profile you created, from the dropdown list.

5. Click Apply. The IT automation profile is now assigned to your agent(s).

Note: You can also apply the automation profile, to all or some of your customers, directly from the automation profile itself.

To apply the automation profile to customers:

1. Go to Admin (on the side panel) > Patch Management and IT Automation.

2. Click the profile you wish to assign.

The Profile page appears.

3. Click on Applied to, in the gray box, on the left.

The Profile Relations screen appears. 

4. Click on Add Customer(s), and select the customers you wish to assign the profile to. You can select some or all of your customers.

 5. When done with your selections, click Save.

 The profile is now applied to the selected customer(s).