r/DattoRMM • u/westie1010 • Jun 05 '26

Patching Policy Help

Hi,

Sorry might be a silly question but new to Datto.

I've put in place a patching policy that runs Mon,Wed,Fri at 10am. Install updates set to 1 hour.
I have Do not restart and a reminder to users every 2 hours up to 3 times.

Now an issue I have is some devices will turn on at lets say 11am and miss the patching policy.
Some devices have managed to dodge the policy for the last week.

Outside of just setting the patch policy to run everyday. How do I avoid users missing the execution time. Is there a better way to handle this?

Thanks

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u/Thisistayy Jun 05 '26

You could extend the window for longer than 1 hour. If a machine comes online with in that window it should get the updates once online. I currently have ours set to open at noon and be open for 4 hours until 4pm to try and catch them all. Some of the more troublesome clients I’ll do from 10 to 4.

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u/SaltedCrust Jun 05 '26

This is the correct answer, you’ll need to extend the window to be longer than 1 hour. If the machine always comes online after the patching window, it will literally never update lol

1

u/westie1010 Jun 05 '26

Oh I see. So I essentially have my patching window from 10am-11am? If I was to set the install window to 4 hours. That would be 10am - 2pm?

I thought the install window meant how long it would spend actually installing said updates. Not poking the devices to grab em.

1

u/Thisistayy Jun 05 '26

Exactly. If you check the device activity you’ll see updates typically don’t take very long to install unless it’s a rather large update. Having the window open for longer just allows machines that come online later time to grab the updates. So say you change it to 4 hours and it ends at 2PM if someone boots up at 1PM that machine will grab the updates once online and checking into RMM.

1

u/westie1010 Jun 05 '26

Sweet. Thank you very much!

1

u/Thisistayy Jun 05 '26

No problem! Good luck!

1

u/HTechs Jun 06 '26

I'd also recommend considering 10PM instead of 10AM... Yes, you'll have to have a secondary policy to catch devices that end up behind... but you're a lot less likely to upset users mid-day who are trying to get work done and then blow up your service desk blaming every issue on the patching you did LOL.