Activity Log is Reporting a False Positive

Activity Log is reporting a false positive

Perhaps you're looking in the Activity Log, and it shows an Installation was successful, but in the end, the patches were not installed. Here we explain what typically happens. 

Usually, we see something with messaging, such as:

{"args":"\"e902424c-97e9-480f-b72c-574fee79e846\"","response":"[\"0\",\"Installing MS updates: \\\"e902424c-97e9-480f-b72c-574fee79e846\\\"\\r\\nCouldn't find update for e902424c-97e9-480f-b72c-574fee79e846, skipping.\\r\\nNothing left to do\",null]"}

The Activity Log then reports something like this:

{'text': 'Installed patches: "2022-09 Cumulative Update for Windows Server 2019 (1809) for x64-based Systems (KB5017315)"', 'status': '0'}

However, the patches were not installed.

Explanation

Automox depends entirely on devices for reporting, patching, installing, and rebooting. Automox works more as an initiator of updates and installations when it comes to the OS Package Management system. The only updates we keep a repo of are third-party supported software (seen here: Third-Party Software Support).

When it comes to the OS, we initiate the package manager for everything (at least in accordance with the configuration in the Group Settings of the devices). Because an install command was sent out, the Package Manager sees the command and reports back that there was "Nothing left to do", meaning that the packages have already been installed.

In the response from the device (the first line of code), we can see that there is no error code contained within; it just saysnull (towards the end of it). This means there were no errors reported, and the way the agent works is it reports the installation as successful. This is a current limitation of the Automox agent.