Patch Policy Show as Successful, But Nothing Was Installed

Why does my patch policy show as successful when nothing was installed?

Activity logs can be used to determine what happened to a device when something was patched. However, there are times that we encounter a message in the activity log that shows the patch was successful, but the software or update wasn't actually installed

For a reference on what happens on the backend, most of the time we get messages like this:

{"args":"\"675d532b-cdd5-4f87-a918-72af430c86a9\" \"380b5a87-db97-4b18-8a81-8230d7ca9f65\" \"5fe205cd-a1e7-48c6-873e-92bebe4dc52a\" \"1f442c97-5276-44ba-b758-a6d343c843af\"","response":"[\"0\",\"Installing MS updates: \\\"675d532b-cdd5-4f87-a918-72af430c86a9\\\",\\\"380b5a87-db97-4b18-8a81-8230d7ca9f65\\\",\\\"5fe205cd-a1e7-48c6-873e-92bebe4dc52a\\\",\\\"1f442c97-5276-44ba-b758-a6d343c843af\\\"\\r\\nCouldn't find update for 675d532b-cdd5-4f87-a918-72af430c86a9, skipping.\\r\\nCouldn't find update for 380b5a87-db97-4b18-8a81-8230d7ca9f65, skipping.\\r\\nCouldn't find update for 5fe205cd-a1e7-48c6-873e-92bebe4dc52a, skipping.\\r\\nCouldn't find update for 1f442c97-5276-44ba-b758-a6d343c843af, skipping.\\r\\nNothing left to do\",null]"}

If there is no error received in the response (note: "response":"[\"0\"), then the agent will not log the "failure" as an error. It will show that the policy was successful.

What can be inferred is from the tail end of the response: skipping.\\r\\nNothing left to do\",null]"}. This means that the policy ran with the updates, and the device responded back saying that there was nothing to do either because the updates were already installed or are no longer necessary. Either one of these responses are not a result of Automox's policy run, but of what the Windows Update Package Manager has found is still available or no longer there.