Works well but has issues with 3rd party updates.
What do you like best?
Patch manager was great when pushing out Microsoft updates and the other approved vendor updates supported by Solar Winds. This was very useful when keeping within compliance and made patching easy by creating deployment groups. By creating different deployment groups, we were able to update our systems within a timely fashion and without overloading our network during peak times.
What do you dislike?
Although most updates were easy to deploy, we had issues sending updates through Patch manager if you're attempting to push out 3rd party updates which are not officially approved by Solar Winds. There have been products by certain vendors where Patch Manager could not detect the version differences properly and would not update the software. This process to get the proper file versions identified through Patch manager could be easy, but there have been times where I've spent weeks testing to see if the version differences would be identified properly. If you absolutely need your 3rd party vendor updates pushed by Patch Manager, be ready for a lot of trial and error tests to make this work. Out of 30+ vendor software applications used on our workstations, there are still 6-8 pieces of software which could not be identified properly. There's definitely a huge block of time needed to set this up, but once it's working, everything is great.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
For implementation, this product works very well with 85% of our software, but expect a large amount of setup time to get those 3rd party vendor applications to update through Patch Manager.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
To identify software versions on 3rd party vendors not supported, we have worked countless hours trying to find the right files which will help identify the differences in the versions properly. Once they can be indentified, patching is easy.
