Atera’s Patch Management and IT Automation lets you perform a variety of crucial support tasks including patching, software bundle installation, Windows version upgrades, disk management, maintenance, automated scripting, and more. An automation profile with any of the above tasks can be scheduled to run one-time, weekly, monthly, or flexibly.
While individual automation profiles can be configured separately, there are also settings that apply universally to all profiles.
Exclude patches
You can exclude certain patches from all active automation profiles, such as critical updates, security patches, service packs, drivers, tools, and upgrades
Note: To exclude OS patches for a single automation profile, see Patch Approval
To exclude patches for all automation profiles:
1. Go to Admin > Monitoring and automation > Patch Management and IT Automation.
The Patch Management and IT Automation page appears.
2. Under Excluded patches, click Manage.
The Select patches window appears.
3. Search for and select patches to exclude. Then click Select.
The selected patches are displayed under Excluded patches and will be excluded from installation by all automation profiles.
Default offline agent execution preference
You can select how automation profiles handle offline devices since profiles can only perform tasks on online devices. You can specify how long to keep trying to run profiles on offline devices, by queuing automations to run if agents come online within the selected timeframe. Once the devices appear online in your Atera Dashboard, the automations will attempt to run immediately, provided there are no issues with the agent itself.
Note: The default preference will apply to all individual profiles configured with the "x (default)" option. This means individual profiles with the "x (default)" configuration are locked with the default configuration and will align with any changes made to it. However, profiles configured with any other option will not be affected.
To set offline agent execution preferences for a single profile, see Automate patch management via automation profiles
To set the default offline agent execution preference for all profiles:
1. Go to Admin > Monitoring and automation > Patch Management and IT Automation.
The Patch Management and IT Automation page appears.
2. Under Settings, select your default offline agent execution preference:
- Online agents only: Scheduled automation profiles will run on online agents only and will not be queued for offline agents.
- Queue for up to 1 hour: Scheduled automation profiles will run if agents come online within 1 hour.
- Queue for up to 1 day: Scheduled automation profiles will run if agents come online within 1 day.
- Queue for up to 1 week: Scheduled automation profiles will run if agents come online within 1 week.
- Queue for up to 2 weeks: Scheduled automation profiles will run if agents come online within 2 weeks.
- Queue for up to 1 month: Scheduled automation profiles will run if agents come online within 1 month.
3. Click Update.
Your default offline agent execution preference is saved and will be applied to all new automation profiles — and existing profiles already configured with "x (default)".
If you encounter any problems, see: