Azure Update Management Center (Preview)

Last Updated on May 14, 2024 by Arnav Sharma

Update management centre (preview) is a unified service to help manage and govern updates for all your machines. You can monitor Windows and Linux update compliance across your deployments in Azure, on-premises, and on the other cloud platforms from a single dashboard. Using the Update management centre (preview), you can make updates in real-time or schedule them within a defined maintenance window.

The update management centre has been redesigned and doesn’t depend on Azure Automation or Azure Monitor Logs, as required by the Azure Automation Update Management feature.

These are the requirements

• An Azure account with an active subscription. If you don’t have one yet, sign up for a free account.
• Your role must be either an Owner or Contributor for Azure VM and resource administrator for Arc-enabled servers.
• Ensure that the target machines meet the specific operating system requirements of the Windows Server and Linux.

The Interface:

The Overview Page provides historical reporting of the virtual machines and patch updates – information on when new options or updates are available, and the ability to schedule and make changes to the update status are available as shown.

The machines tab gives an overview of the status and machine enabled for updates:

Update Settings:

Hotpatching allows you to install updates on supported Windows Server Azure Edition virtual machines without requiring a reboot after installation. It reduces the number of reboots required on your mission-critical application workloads running on Windows Server.

Path Orchestration option had couple of additional settings:

For better compliance and automation, assigning policies from within the updates management enables us to assess updates at scale routinely.

If you’re keen to explore, you need to enable the below feature using the Preview Features options from the Azure Portal.