Windows Update/Patch Testing ?

sreekumarpg

Hi All.

Am quite excited to know how you all are dealing with windows patch management.

I would like to know how the patch is being tested and generating reports? Test plan

Any tools for recording the changes before and after the patch installation.

Currently we are manually monitoring the event log , IIS log , CPU utilisation .etc.

Please suggest best practice and tools which can be utilise for patch testing and reporting.

We are a fairly large company and we actually stopped doing most testing up updates. Our Reports come from WSUS and Manage Engine Products.

scottalanmiller

@sreekumarpg said:

I would like to know how the patch is being tested and generating reports? Test plan

Only the biggest enterprises should consider testing. Testing is very expensive and risky. Can you really test, in a meaningful way, every patch as fast as Microsoft turns them out? It's not possible.

The most risky thing you can do is not patching or patching slowly. Do not test patches. Microsoft already does far, far more testing than you can do. Yes, testing is a great idea but the cost and complexity of this is far beyond what an SMB can possibly consider. Just patch and do so as quickly as possible.

scottalanmiller

@sreekumarpg said:

Any tools for recording the changes before and after the patch installation.

You should be taking a snapshot of the system via your hypervisor before applying the patches so that you have the ability to roll back if needed. This will protect you from nearly all patch problems.

scottalanmiller

Of course, you should patch in some sort of rolling fashion. If you have Active Directory, for example, patch one DC at a time so that you know that you have one working post patch before you patch the next one.

scottalanmiller

@sreekumarpg said:

Please suggest best practice and tools which can be utilise for patch testing and reporting.

WSUS is really all you need in most cases.

Dashrender

WSUS is what I use. I don't force user reboots, so that's the hardest part about them being fully applied around here.

sreekumarpg

Thanks All for the support and suggestions