Scanning your instances and patching them against the latest OS updates is achieved by creating Scan and Patch tasks, which can be executed as on-demand tasks (run immediately) or scheduled to run based upon your requirements.


Please note that compliance data for your instances will only appear after you have run your first scan task against an instance.  For more information on creating compliance reports, please see the following KB article How do I create a compliance report for all of my instances? 


What you will need:

  • You need to know what server(s) you want to patch.
  • You need to know what patch policy you want to apply.
  • You need to know if you want to send people notifications through AWS or Slack when this task completes.  Default is to NOT send Notifications.  
  • You need to know if you if you want to run this task immediately or if you want to Schedule this to run on a regular schedule.


Running a Scan task:

  1. Navigate to the Operations  page
       

  2. Click on +New Task to start the task creation wizard.

        

  3. Select the Scan task to schedule regular scans to determine the current patch baseline of your instances. This will only scan your instances, and will not deploy patches.

    When you want to execute, or schedule the actual deployment of patches, use the Patch task instead.

  4. Enter your Task Details → Click Next.
    Task details should contain human readable information that helps you identify the scan task at a later time.

        

  5. Choose your Patch Policy → Click Next.
    Patch policies are based on operating system or Linux distribution. For a heterogenous environment, you will need to configure a scan task for each patch policy you wish to use based upon the operating systems used within your cloud instances.

        

  6. Select your Targets → Click Next
    Targets can be selected based upon individual instances, or server groups that you create.

        

  7. If you desire to be notified when a scan task has completed, you can use the Notifications step to setup a notification. 

    1. To Enable - Toggle the button if you want to Enable Notifications.   (Default is Disable Notification) → Click “Add Notification” → Select (Slack or AWS SNS) → Enter your details → Click Add → Click Next
             

    2. To Disable (Default) Notifications – Make sure the toggle button is set to Disable. → Click Next

          
  8. The Automation step instructs the DAY2 platform when you want to execute the scan task.   The default is to run immediately (an on-demand task), but scan tasks can also be scheduled.
    1. To execute this Task now Choose Now (Default is Now) → Click Next
             

    2. To execute this Task at a scheduled time choose Later → Select the time you would like to schedule this → Click Next

          
  9. Review the task details, and then click Create Scan to finish the task creation process.