How can I use BigFix or Inventory to monitor applications progress after rebooting patching Windows and/or Linux servers post patching? Is there any way these tools can be used to verify that applications have successfully started after a reboot?
It’s not going to be “pretty” but yes, you can design something depending on what/how you are willing to do it and what your reboot procedures are. One example is you can create an Open Policies against the machines that run application X with relevance clause1: now - boot time of operating system <= 10 * minute // it activates after a machine was rebooted
Put the actionscript or second criteria whatever fits your application, let’s say that you want to make sure service X is running after reboot:
Relevance Clause 2: exist service “X” whose (state of it != “Running”)
Actionscript: dos net start X
The benefit of this is that it will work regardless from where the endpoint is rebooted; downside is if you have a lot of applications and need to leave a lot of open policies permanently you may run into performance issues at some stage.
Another approach to design your own reboot baseline for your servers where you have a fixlet to “stop application gracefully”, then one to reboot and one that becomes relevant only after reboot (similar relevance to previous example), and runs your application start-up things. The benefit is that you don’t need to leave permanent open policies out there; the con is that you have to always reboot using BigFix - if someone is to go and whack the server manually there is nothing to monitor your application.
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