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matthew_hyperic
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Software version control / patch level management

Hi all,

I have spent a little while playing with the enterprise version of hyperic (looking to replace nagios monitoring our 250ish windows/unix servers). I cant find a feature which may prove to be critical for us - Version control.

ie. We approve software foo with patches bar1 and bar2 to be in our environment.

Any thoughts on how this can be achieved would be appreciated.


MJH
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admin
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MJH,

You're correct, the plugins report versions for you as part of autodiscovery. And you can create a group of a given resourcce type across all your machines to give you info, reports and alerts that apply to all instances of just that software.

As for updates, since you can't use Puppet, you can create alerts based on the version as Stacey points out, and you could consider using a script to upgrade or patch. That script can be manually triggered by you when you're alerted of a version issue or automated by your binding your script to your version-change alert.

For example, you upgrade/patch one system, then set an alert to tell you all systems that don't match that version. You upgrade/patch all machines not of that version.

Let me know if that helps.

--jeremy

Message was edited by: jeremy

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staceyeschneide
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Hi there,

While HQ can alert you on the version changes - if there were any configuration changes, we do not enforce those rules explicitly or deliver the updates. For something like that, you would want to look at a configuration management tool like Puppet or something.

HQ will really help you to monitor changes and become aware of any type of event, and of course chart and trend historical performance in a single web interface.

Hope this helps,
-Stacey
matthew_hyperic
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First of all, thanks for the helpful reply.

puppet - I hear good things of it... Our infrastructure is over 90% windows 😞
We do run SMS and I have just spoken to our SMS guy about wether we could use SMS to report on MSSQL version / patch levels. The answer was yes.. but a drawn-out painful yes..

Any pointers as to how I can track versions? I assume that as part of an auto-discover the hyperic agent runs through the installed applications table. Is there a nice way to tap into this, or would I have to perform a manual registry lookup.

Cheers,
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admin
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MJH,

You're correct, the plugins report versions for you as part of autodiscovery. And you can create a group of a given resourcce type across all your machines to give you info, reports and alerts that apply to all instances of just that software.

As for updates, since you can't use Puppet, you can create alerts based on the version as Stacey points out, and you could consider using a script to upgrade or patch. That script can be manually triggered by you when you're alerted of a version issue or automated by your binding your script to your version-change alert.

For example, you upgrade/patch one system, then set an alert to tell you all systems that don't match that version. You upgrade/patch all machines not of that version.

Let me know if that helps.

--jeremy

Message was edited by: jeremy
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matthew_hyperic
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I have to admit that that sounds somewhat better than I had hoped.

I'm on holiday for the next few days, will get stuck in on my return to work.

Thanks to both of you.

BTW, next on my list - monitoring BizTalk....
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