Storage spikes during Patching

Usage and Config Patch
1

Having an issue where our systems are seeing a large spike in storage during patching. this is causing our alerts to trigger for storage space and has been a pain. We only started seeing this spike once we switched to using patch policies instead of manually creating the patching baselines. The storage increase is roughly around 10GB but then clears up after patching is completed. Just wondering what BigFix is doing on these systems during that time. any insight would be much appreciated.

2

If we have to guess based on that limited information, I’d guess that your systems have about 10 GB worth of missing patches that are selected by Patch Policy, but not all of them are being selected by your operators when you create a patch baseline manually

3

Thanks for the reply Jason! I assumed the same thing as well, but it is every month (using patch policy about 4 months now) that each system is having this issue. My thought would be is that they eventually catch up with any old missing patches they would need. Also when looking into the client logs (…_Global\Logs) on the systems they are only applying one or two patches(the most recent ones) for that month and that is it. I also checked the cbs logs but didn’t come up with anything

Is there anyplace else I could look to see what bigfix may be downloading? Another log that may contain more info? Looking at the installed updates in the control panel I also only show the two most recent updates being applied.

4

@mattgarrett1981 from my understanding Patch Policy logic occur on the WebUI side.

The Client will only receive an Action and will follow the same logic as any other action

  • Evaluation which content on the Action is relevant for that machine

  • For each relevant content , it will clear the Download folder , try to download it and then install

Did you configure on the Schedule the option to Download the Binary files before the execution?

5

Did you enable downloading patch before scheduled time? if so the client may be downloading ALL available patches in the baseline vs just the ones needed at the time of execution.

Try Not downloading before the constraints are satisfied

6

Thanks for all the replies here. I think we have determined the issue is only with 2016 windows servers. After doing some research it seems like 2016 Cumulative Updates are downloading the full CU and then applying only what is necessary and then cleaning up. This results in about a 8-10GB spike on storage for these hosts.

Thanks again for the replies.

1 Like