Check update compliance with update management center (preview)

Applies to: ✔️ Windows VMs ✔️ Linux VMs ✔️ On-premises environment ✔️ Azure Arc-enabled servers.

This article details how to check the status of available updates on a single VM or multiple machines using update management center (preview).

Check updates on single VM

Note

You can check the updates from the Overview or Machines blade in update management center (preview) page or from the selected VM.

From Overview blade

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.

2. In Update management center (Preview), Overview, select your Subscription to view all your machines and select Check for updates.

3. In Select resources and check for updates, choose the machine for which you want to check the updates and select Check for updates.

   An assessment is performed and a notification appears as a confirmation.

   

   The Update status of machines, Patch orchestration configuration of Azure virtual machines, and Total installation runs tiles are refreshed and display the results.

From Machines blade

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.

2. In Update management center (preview), Machines, select your Subscription to view all your machines.

3. Select your machine from the checkbox and select Check for updates, Assess now or alternatively, you can select your machine, in Updates Preview, select Assess updates, and in Trigger assess now, select OK.

   An assessment is performed and a notification appears first that the Assessment is in progress and after a successful assessment, you will see Assessment successful else, you will see the notification Assessment Failed. For more information, see update assessment scan.

From a selected VM

1. Select your virtual machine and the virtual machines | Updates page opens.

2. Under Operations, select Updates.

3. In Updates, select Go to Updates using Update Center.

   

4. In Updates (Preview), select Assess updates, in Trigger assess now, select OK.

   An assessment is performed and a notification appears first that the Assessment is in progress and after a successful assessment, you will see Assessment successful else, you will see the notification Assessment Failed.

   

For more information, see update assessment scan.

Check updates at scale

To check the updates on your machines at scale, follow these steps:

Note

You can check the updates from the Overview or Machines blade.

From Overview blade

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.

2. In Update management center (preview), Overview, select your Subscription to view all your machines and select Check for updates.

3. In Select resources and check for updates, choose your machines for which you want to check the updates and select Check for updates.

   An assessment is performed and a notification appears as a confirmation.

   The Update status of machines, Patch orchestration configuration of Azure virtual machines, and Total installation runs tiles are refreshed and display the results.

From Machines blade

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.

2. In Update management center (preview), Machines, select your Subscription to view all your machines.

3. Select the Select all to choose all your machines and select Check for updates.

4. Select Assess now to perform the assessment.

   A notification appears when the operation is initiated and completed. After a successful scan, the Update management center (Preview) | Machines page is refreshed to display the updates.

Note

In update management center (preview), you can initiate a software updates compliance scan on the machine to get the current list of operating system (guest) updates including the security and critical updates. On Windows, the software update scan is performed by the Windows Update Agent. On Linux, the software update scan is performed using OVAL-compatible tools to test for the presence of vulnerabilities based on the OVAL Definitions for that platform, which is retrieved from a local or remote repository.

Next steps

• Learn about deploying updates to your machines to maintain security compliance by reading deploy updates.
• To view update assessment and deployment logs generated by update management center (preview), see query logs.
• To troubleshoot issues, see Troubleshoot Azure Update management center (preview).