No patch installation, no visible error

Question

Hello,

We are testing Azure Update Manager but unfortunately we are running into troubles.

We have a machine onboarded in Arc, the periodic update assessment is running fine, I can see the updates that are needed by the machine.

This morning I created a maintenance configuration to deploy the updates in the afternoon.
The schedule was configured like this :
Starts on : Thu Mar 14 2024 14:00 ((UTC+01:00) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris)
Repeats : On day1 every month
Ends on : Fri Mar 15 2024 14:00 ((UTC+01:00) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris)
Maintenance window : 3 hours 55 minutes

No dynamic scope was configured.
In the Resources, I selected my test server.
For the updates, I selected all the classifications, I didn't configure the include/exclude updates.

In the afternoon, at 14h00, I checked the machine and saw that a powershell process was launched by System and 2 minutes after that I saw a tiworker process being launched. I thought that the updates were getting installed.
Unfortunately, 5 minutes later, no more tiworker and no more powershell processes. The machine wasn't doing anything anymore and no updates were installed.

At the end of the maintenance window, I checked back the machine and it was still the same, no updates were installed.

I checked the machine in Arc \ Updates and it was like nothing ever happened. In the History tab, there is only one operation related to the periodic assessment and in the Scheduling tab, I can see the maintenance configuration with 'maintenance state', 'impact type', and 'estimated impact', all marked as 'N/A'.

On the machine itself, I checked the eventlog there was no trace of an update even started installing.
There is nowhere a trace of an error message.

Does anyone have an idea where we can look ?

Thanks in advance for your help

Marc

Answer 1

Ideally the extension version should not have caused the schedule to not fire. You may check the History tab in AUM to confirm if there were any failed schedules or failed updates.

What i have noticed is that in your first maintenance configuration, you had configured the schedule to run on the 1st of the month.

*Starts on : Thu Mar 14 2024 14:00 ((UTC+01:00) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris) *

*Repeats : On day1 every month *

Ends on : Fri Mar 15 2024 14:00 ((UTC+01:00) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris) Maintenance window : 3 hours 55 minutes

The next Day 1 of the month was going to be 1st April, so possibly AUM didn't run the schedule because the schedule start date was on 14th March and end date was on 16th March.

In the next maintenance configuration, the repeats pattern was changed to every day, and it worked :)

Starts on : Thu Mar 14 2024 14:00 ((UTC+01:00) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris)

Repeats : Every day

Ends on : Sat Mar 16 2024 13:00 ((UTC+01:00) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris) Maintenance window : 3 hours 55

Answer 2

I don't know why my previous comment was deleted.

So today I tried again the patching on the same machine (as explained in my previous comment) and all went as expected. The machine was updated according the schedule.

It is the same procedure we used every time and it is the first time that it worked.

This time I could find a WindowsUpdateExtension log file where I could see the details of the installation.

The only difference between yesterday and today is that I had updated the extensions on the machine.
Could that really be the cause of all our problems ?

I doubt it otherwise I wouldn't have been the only one complaining about these kind of problems.
Next week I will try the same on other machines.

Marc