This troubleshooting appendix is intended to help you resolve issues when managing Patch Management. It contains error codes and issues you might encounter, as well as many of the actions you can take to resolve these issues.
Many issues can be avoided by following the guidance in the Patch Policy - Best Practices section in this reference. If you have not already evaluated your Patch Policy configuration with this guidance, we recommend that you do so.
For information about system variables that you can use in Patch Management to enable or disable patch related features, see Section B.0, System Variables.
In many cases patch issues that occur are not related to the Patch Management software or configuration, but can be a problem with a patch itself or an environment issue. Before referring to the content in this appendix, you may want to review the actions below to see if they can help resolve your issue:
Read event logs to see if there is any indication of native hardware, software, or environment issues that need to be resolved.
The WSH types will show the actions taken by ZPM to apply the patch. Msiexec or other errors may also be seen.
Determine if the target device meets patch requirements, such as operating system, Bit-level, and so forth.
Execute a search for error codes to determine if the issue is vendor or Patch Management related.
Apply the patch using the vendor's patching mechanism.
For example, if it is a Microsoft Windows update, use Windows Update to apply the patch. If it fails repeatedly AND fails on multiple machines, the patch is probably bad and needs to be fixed by the vendor. You should contact the vendor directly to report the issue.