PROBLEM:
What is the recommended practice for scheduling Patch Scans and Automatic Updates?
SOLUTION:
Microsoft releases patches on the second Tuesday of each month. This is often times referred to as 'Patch Tuesday'. Because of this, we recommend that patch scans be scheduled after Patch Tuesday and no more than once a week
As 'Automatic Update' is dependent on Patch Scans, we recommend scheduling Automatic Updates to run after Patch Scans have run. A patch scan scheduled on a Thursday or Firday with an Automatic Update scheduled on one of the following days would be ideal.
We say that Thursday or Friday is ideal for Patch scans because Microsoft sometimes releases bad patches that negatively affect machines and they are not aware of the issue till a day or two after the patches are released.
Additionally, when scheduling Patch Scans, make sure to schedule Patch Scans with a large distribution window. Each Patch Scan generates an xml file locally on the endpoint which is then transferred to the Kaseya server. This xml file is processed and then consumed by the database. This process is time consuming and scheduling too many patch scans in too short a period can be result in performance degradation and can potentially bring your Kaseya server down. We recommend scheduling patch scans with a large distribution window so not to run more than 150 an hour.