SolarWinds Event Manager will bring information
in from all over your infrastructure.
It can talk to routers and switches
and also servers.
And a lot of times,
the servers will use an agent.
The trick with this is
sometimes installing an agent
during business hours is not always the safest thing.
And if you allow automatic updates on that
then that might interrupt
critical business practices.
But using SolarWinds Patch Manager,
we can automate that for very specific times.
Let me show you how it's done.
The first thing we need to do is validate
that you're not automatically pushing updates.
So we'll go up to settings,
and then we'll come down to updates.
And you need to make sure
that automatic updates is not enabled.
We're gonna look at our existing agents
by going to nodes.
Here we have a server that's running Agent Version 2020.2
but the version of SEM is 2020.4,
which means this one needs an update.
And there's also a missing server from this list.
So we're gonna go ahead and push an update
and a full install.
To set those up,
we'll use SolarWinds Patch Manager.
We're gonna first validate
that we have a group built
for our SEM agents.
So we'll expand, "Enterprise",
"Update Services",
expand our WSUS server,
and go to, "Computers and Groups",
and then, "All Computers."
And there we go,
SEM Agents.
You can see in that group we have
two servers where we want the agent
but it's only one one
and that's an older version,
and we need to install it on the other one.
And to do that we'll build an update package,
and a clean install package.
So we'll go to "Administration and Reporting",
"Software Publishing",
and then come down to "SolarWinds Inc. Packages".
This list of packages
that are published by SolarWinds
are automatically available
in any version of Patch Manager,
including the trial.
So we're gonna go ahead
and select the SEM Agents
and set them up for deployment.
We want to select the 2020.4 upgrade
and full version,
but we'll start with the upgrade.
What we'll need to do is publish this
to our WSUS server.
So right click, and publish packages.
We'll select the default WSUS server.
And for some of these packages,
you'll be prompted with something like this.
This package doesn't have direct download links,
so we need to download it for it.
So click on the links.
And then we need to extract a file out of it.
So, "Show in folder".
We'll need to extract the contents
of the ZIP file.
And there's our installer.
So we go back to Patch Manager,
and select, "Import Source".
And then browse for that executable.
It's in, "Downloads" in the extraction folder,
and then select the file.
Now what this has done is this has taken
that executable and actually loaded it
to the Patch Manager server,
but we still haven't published it
all the way to WSUS.
We'll do that in a second.
So we hit OK,
and now it's publishing to WSUS.
And now that's been published
to your WSUS server.
We're gonna do the same thing
for the full install.
Since this is the same executable,
we can reuse.
And you can see
that published packages have a different icon.
Since the package for our upgrade
has already been talking
to our centralized manager,
it already knows the IP to use,
but we need to define that
for the full install.
So we'll edit the package,
accept the defaults,
accept the prereqs.
Here in the command line area,
we need to replace, "MANAGER_IP"
with the actual manager IP
or fully qualified domain name.
And then remove, "DELETE THIS TEXT".
Now that they're published to WSUS,
we need to approve them.
So we'll go to, "Updates,"
"Third Party Updates,"
select them both,
and approve them.
Once the updates are approved,
we can send them out.
We'll select the computers we want to use.
"SEM Agents" again.
We'll add them all.
And then we can schedule it.
For this example,
we're only gonna send it one time,
so that they'll deploy near immediately.
You can watch the deployment
by going down to "Active Tasks."
And there's your job.
And it's done.
Let's check if they're reporting back to SEM.
And we can just validate
by going to nodes,
and there they are.
Our two servers,
both running 2020.4.
By leveraging patch manager,
now you can control when
and what agents are updated
on your schedule.
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