Table of content:
Introduction:
If you look around Connect for Patch Trending you will find a number of downloads, articles or even blog post. These are the result of a customer driven process that allowed the tool set to grow organically to something sizable.
This document aims to be the only place you need to go through to get up and running with the tool.
Unpacking:
The installation pack is available from the Site Builder download page, but here is a quick link:
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/sites/default/files/Patch Trending Package_0.zip.
Unpack the package into a location of your choice:
Installing:
Note! If your SMP is _not_ installed using the default drive and path you'll need to customise the installation directory - see below for the details.
Open an elevated command prompt and go to your package directory to run "install.bat".
The installation process will:
- Copy SiteBuilder-v14.exe to the destination folder
- Copy SiteBuilder-v14.exe to SiteBuilder.exe in the destination folder
- Copy site-layout.txt to the destination folder
- Copy web.config to the destination folder
- Import 5 items into the SMP database
Console items:
The SMP console will now have the following items at the root of the "Job and Task" folder:
- Run SiteBuilder (Patch Trending)
- RunOnce SiteBuilder (Install SQL code)
- TRENDING Compliance by computer
- TRENDING Compliance by update
- TRENDING Inactive computer
Run once:
The SiteBuilder executable contains all the required stored procedure to trend compliance by update, compliance by computer and inactive computers. To add the procedures into the db (or rest them) the site builder must be invoked with the command line option "/install".
This is done by running the task "RunOnce SiteBuilder (Install SQL code)".
Scheduling:
Next you need to schedule the 4 remaining tasks to run daily. The trending tasks (that run the SQL) are best run at the end of the day (so you collect and display data for the day on which the collection is done) and the Site Builder task must run once the trending task completed.
Here is an sample scheduling table:
| Task Name | Schedule |
TRENDING Compliance by computer | Daily 23:45 |
| TRENDING Compliance by update | Daily 23:49 |
| TRENDING Inactive computer | Daily 23:53 |
| Run SiteBuilder (Patch Trending) | Daily 23:57 |
Custom destination:
If your Notification Server directory is not under the default drive and path you need to take a few additional steps from the above process to install the toolkit.
On the command line and before running install.bat you must set the installation directory in this manner:
set installdir="<desired destination folder>"
For example:
set installdir="C:\Program Files\Altiris\Patch Trending"
or
set installdir="D:\Altiris\Notification Server\Web\Patch Trending"
Once the items are imported in the SMP console, you need to modify the 2 tasks that run site builder with your custom path:
Conclusion:
With the data collection and site builder scheduled to run you should be able to see some results after a couple of nightly execution (the first night should build up the site with empty graphs and the second night will bring in the data required to draw lines).
References:
[1] {CWoc} Patch Trending SiteBuilder
[2] {CWoC} Patch Trending: Adding Patch Compliance Trending Capacity ...
[3] {CWoC} Patch Trending Stored Procedures
[4] {CWoC} Patch Trending: Adding a Compliance by Computer module
[5] {CWoC} Patch Trending: Inactive Computer Trending Report