Patch Management - not working

IesoHealth

Hi all,

 

So TeamViewer announced the patch management component of their asset management suite about a month ago.  Initially I was happy to see this, however not longer after this was announced it was obivous that this was "hit and miss".  Sometimes it would appear to work and other times you would get a messgae it was installing the patches but not, or a spinning wheel would just appear.

 

I reported this as soon as I could confirm the issue, and have had some replies from their support, that they have acknowledged this and are working on it.  However these repies are not very frequent and do not detail what they have acknowledged or what they are doing with it.

 

I am disappointed in the new announcement and inability for it to actually do what it is announced about, and also the fact that a month has gone by and nothing has been communicated since.

 

This is just as broken as it was  month ago and effectively I am left in a state where I am losing any confidence in this actually working at all.  I am not having to consider other options and as a result losing any confidence in TeamViewer in totality.

 

So in order to get some movement from TeamViewer and to see if this is wider than just my experience, I thought I would reach out to the community and see if we anyone else is effectively being given the "spinning wheel" on waiting for some communications and resolution to this newly announced part of the asset managment suite.

 

Come on TeamViewer, communications is KING.  Get your act together,

Levon

Dear valued customer,

Thank you for your message and feedback.
The first version of Patch Management was released in the beginning of October with the main purpose of gathering feedback from customers and then implementing this feedback into the product, to better meet the needs of our customers.We are actively working on Patch Management to improve product stability and usability. As a result of the feedback from our customers the second release of Patch Management will include automation. This means that missing patches will be deployed automatically after you set up the criteria and schedule the deployment. This automation policy will be available in the next release, which is planned for the end of this month.

If you have any other questions or suggestions please let us know.

With Best Rgards,
Levon

IesoHealth

Hi,

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

No-one on the support ticket, nor in the announcement has clarified that this is the first version.  in fact the ticket has been trying to close every three days due to no updates and I continually deny the auto-closure to keep it alive.

 

I appreciate that this is the first version, but my point is it does not work as advertised, and communication around this should be made.  Setting expectations eith your end users is paramount, and now with theis reply I can adjust my plans to look for an alternative if the need drives it.  In the ticket prior to reporting this I was requesting any documentation to understand the expected behaviour for this implementation, but there does not seem to be any, so I was not sure if the spinning wheel was ecpted or not.

 

The up-shot here is I am not confident in this working, and as a result I cannot trust the tool to deliver the patch management it proposes to resolve.  This is a shame as the single pain of glass idea behind this is good.  The lack of confidence is this delivering will have a knock on impact to the other areas also.

 

I look forward to hearing more towards the end of the month of the development of this area of the tool, but right now, do not feel I can trust it for controlling the OS patch management and 3rd party management.

PCL-Stephen

I too was really pleased to see the Patch Management feature appear out of the blue. It is, as you've found very hit and miss.

It appeared at the end of last week some bug fixes had rolled out which fixed some viewing bugs where scrolling through a long list of patches didn't view properly. However, whilst that was fixed I now get no feedback on whether patches are actually deploying.

Yesterday I tried again with some tests. 2 computers deployed, no information was given on the admin console and a third computer nothing happened at all. The only way to know something had happened on the first 2 was feedback from the user and the outstanding patch count going down later in the day for those computers.

Having been on a recent TeamViewer webinar I was already aware that version 2 is planned to be released at the end of November.

I think you are right though. I was quite happy to make use of the product without the automation for now. It's just disappointing that the core function appears so unreliable at the moment. The ability to see what is happening with the update is crucial when you are dealing with remote computers (ie is it downloading, installing, failed to even start).

Hopefully you can get the basic function of deployment more reliable and clear as to what it is doing asap.

Volkfield

I have had nothing but issues with Patch management. I have been experiencing all of the same issues that you have been experiencing. I also have been having issues with the automatic policy deployment that hasn't worked at all either. To be honest this seems to be very broken at this point and being charged for something that doesn't work as advertised is also frustrating.  

Stanislav

Hi @Volkfield 

Thanks for the honest feedback. Did you contact our support to have a look at the issues? 

Patch Management is a new component of the Monitoring & Asset Management service we released and definitely the quality will improve during the next releases. We are counting on customer feedback to improve it as fas as possible. When a new product/service is released it will always have exceptions based on different context the users will have in their networks. This is not different with this release.

 

To be fair, we are not charging for Path Management as it is a Component of Monitoring & Asset Management where every customer has other components as well, such as Monitoring, Asset Management, Network Monitoring which are secure and reliable, same will happen for Patch Management after a few more updates.

If you would like to help us to improve the current version of Patch Management please open a ticket and together with our support colleagues support we will have a look at the described situation and fixes will come for sure.

 

Briggj

I also am not having favorable results with patch management.

 

I have created a schedule to apply updates every night at 10:00PM. This schedule has been in place for 4 days now and the number of patches is seemingly unchanged.

 

After 4 nights, all PCs that this policy touches should be patched to current.

 

I'm dissapointed. I also have to explain to my management why patches aren't being applied after convincing them to purchase the additional license.

 

Update:

I modified the schedule to include non-critical patches and saved it. TeamViewer began pushing the patches immediately instead of the 10:00PM schedule time.

Levon

Hello @Briggj 

Thank you for your feedback.

Patch Management is using UTC time zone for scheduled patches. If you have selected 10:00 PM, policy should apply deployment at that time by UTC. Please check devices were available at that time. In case if yes please contact with our support so we can have a more detailed view and try to solve the issue.

With Best Regards,
Levon

Briggj

Thank you for the reply.

 

It's good to know that it uses UTC. I didn't know that.

 

In any case, 10:00PM UTC would be 5:00PM EST I believe. It would seem that the patches should not have been rolled out immediatly.

Levon

Hi @Briggj ,

Thank you for your reply. 

In order to clarify why this happened I'd like to explain how our Patch Management was developed. Our Patch Management functionality was designed in such a way that after the first policy assignment, the system will check the conditions and will immediately apply deployment for those missing patches which comply with the requirements set (even if scheduling was set for a future date). After this, the next deployment will be done according to the set schedule.

If you have any other questions feel free to let us know.

Regards,
Levon

P-Matt

Hello Levon,

I have a number of tickets open currently with not much progress in any. One that i have been waiting for since 4 days ago has a question that you have just stated the answer to. I am not saying that i agree with the answer but at least i now know why updates are deployed automatically despite being assigned to a policy that stipulates a time and date for deployment. "Our Patch Management functionality was designed in such a way that after the first policy assignment, the system will check the conditions and will immediately apply deployment for those missing patches which comply with the requirements set (even if scheduling was set for a future date)."

Does your support team know this?

My general experience of TV patch management is not good.

• patches reported as successfully deployed, still showing up as outstanding patches 12 hours later.
• Servers restarted despite patch policy to restrict this (although the above answers this)
• Not able to assign patch policies to machines intermittently, 
• machines added to groups don't always pull the policies assigned to the groups
• repeated emails for the same successfully deployed patches (basically causes noise and leads to the sys admin team having no faith in the product

The more issues i have with this product, the less likely we are to use or trust it. For me, the concept is great but at present you are not delivering a workable product.

Levon

Dear Matt,

As discussed today during our call we will check details and come back to you.

Once more thank you for your valued feedback.

Regards,
Levon

Matt9

Hi Levon,

Please contact me to discuss the product, still not able to use it properly.

Thanks

 

Matt

GrahamL

Hi All

Did any of you ever get this working properly? Nearly 18 months later and I am still having the same problems with TeamViewer Patch Management that you reported in this thread. It's hit and miss to the point of being quicker to log into each individual server we patch and do them manually!

In fact - I find I have to log in to the servers anyway, (a) to reboot them, and (b) to check that the patches have actually installed, so there really is absolutely no point to using Patch Management.

As an aside - I tried Automox for a year - with exactly the same result. Automox support fobbed me off several times, their support was horrible. It was only when I cancelled the account they actually asked me for feedback.

So maybe Windows Servers just cannot be patched with an external tool...

I would welcome anyone's thoughts!

Thanks,

Graham

Chaswood

Echoing GrahamL's concerns.

I've had a workstation that has successfully applied the same patch every half hour for the last 24 hours.

I really want for this to work. And where are the Reporting features? Is there a place so I can see at a glance (i.e. give upper management) a report of how patched we are?

lusine_snkhchyan

Hi @Chaswood,

Thanks for your feedback and concern. Could you please open a support ticket and describe the issue in a more detailed way, so our team can resolve the issue asap?

Currently we send email notifications on deployment results to the email addresses indicated in the patch policy section. However, to make sure that you have a solid reporting experience on your patch deployment results, we are releasing the patch exporting functionality on 4th of August. In the Patches tab, you will be able to apply your desired filters (e.g. device, patch importance, install status) and save the results for reporting purposed. More community articles will be posted once the feature is live.

Thanks your for cooperation. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Cheers,

Lusine

WilliamMe

Hi Everyone,

I have recently purchased the Management Products with TeamViewer which also includes the Patch Management function. As users have previously stated, Teamviewer has rolled out a product that's not fully functional without bugs. All someone had to do was demo all these other products, rebuild the concept, brand with your name and move on. It seems you guys are trying to re-invent the wheel and its not working as planned.

-I don't even know if I am updating machines, what's restarting or what has completed. The check-in/discover is not immediate

-All you get is a spinning wheel once you click deploy when it should queue and allow you to go to the next update you want to push

-You get bombarded with a slew of popups saying deployed successfully or failed deployment but your waiting a while for this message to appear and the system is still saying the update is available.

-Why is the product missing so many 3rd party apps updates.

I have a friend who manages over 5,000 servers. They use **Third Party Product**....the system works flawlessly and it even patches 3rd party apps over 950 software. I think someone from Teamviewer should have just did a partnership with this program instead of trying to implement it yourselves. This function is wasting my time because there are apps that I needed to update and I had to login to 30 servers to do it manually when **Third Party Product** had the 3rd party integration all ready.

Is there another update that's coming with Patch Management soon?