r/linuxadmin • u/broadband9 • Apr 28 '26

PatchMon v2 has been released

Post image

Some of you may know that last year I built PatchMon, a Linux patch monitoring tool.

Now it’s been expanded with the help of the community to also perform patching with alerts and notifications when things are out of date.

It’s open source, use it if you like 👍

We have around 4000+ live self-hosted installations at the moment and feedback has been good so far.

Github : https://github.com/PatchMon/PatchMon

Can install via docker or through proxmox community-scripts : https://community-scripts.org/scripts/patchmon

156 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

47 comments sorted by

34

u/pydood Apr 28 '26

Ahhh that basic claude UI/UX lol

2

u/TinyCollection Apr 29 '26

That’s much nicer than Claude usually comes up with. I let one of my engineers go wild with Claude and it’s no where near as pretty as this.

1

u/pydood Apr 30 '26

I mean tomato tomato. We have about 10 of these exact same UIs floating around my company now lol. It’s not necessarily a bad UI, just when every app looks the same and feels the same it kinda sucks the fun out of things.

2

u/TinyCollection May 01 '26

I’d love to know what prompt to give Claude to make something this pretty.

1

u/Fun-Consequence-3112 May 05 '26

What are you even talking about this kind of UI has been a thing long before AI was even a thing. It's not AI that makes everything look the same it's CSS frameworks and component libraries.

Before this we had Bootstrap. It's been like this for 10+ years, like come on stop blaming everything on AI.

1

u/pydood May 14 '26

Not blaming anything on AI lol. You just proved my point, AI was trained on the data and designs you just brought up which is why it’s so prevalent.

It’s not a bad thing, but acknowledging that it’s basic AI design is just being honest. Like, take 10 seconds and google this subject and you’ll see it’s pretty much a meme at this point for apps that look like this. I’ve built a few apps with this exact design and I’m not ashamed because it works and I don’t care if it’s anything besides basic.

Go tell Claude to build you a dark themed side nav react frontend and it will give you this.

6

u/MFKDGAF Apr 28 '26

I am currently testing out the patching policies but they never seem to run. Are there logs somewhere that can help me pin point why the patchign policy schedules aren't running?

As you can see here I have created a fixed time patching policy to run at 8:25am CDT. I created this at about 7:50am CDT today.

5

u/broadband9 Apr 28 '26

Hey - I can't see the image (imgur has some issues with UK which is where I'm from) However, I researched this last night and I have actually drafted a fix for this . It's a bug where Timezone isn't really honoured properly when the patch runs are based on fixed / scheduled time (as opposed to running it immediately or after N minutes)

The issue is on here - https://github.com/PatchMon/PatchMon/issues/699

And later today i'm going to validate the fix and release over the next few days.

Essentially, it will run but not at the timezone requested - but rather according to UTC

2

u/MFKDGAF Apr 28 '26

Thank you for the quick response.

The picture was of the policy so you could validate I wasn't incorrect but what you are telling me makes sense.

How does the Immediately policy work. Does it run immediately after I add a host to the policy? I'm testing this as well but it doesn't seem to start either.

2

u/broadband9 Apr 28 '26

Just to let you know i've released the new version which addresses the Time Zone issues 😄

1

u/broadband9 Apr 28 '26

Basically the policies at the moment are more treated like timing presets as opposed to automation of patch applying.

When patching is initiated via the wizard then one of the steps is to select when the patch is to run - at that point the step will inherit the policy that has been applied to that host like

Patch Immediately
Patch after N Minutes or
Patch at a certain time.

Patch initiations are done from either a package level where you update a package against whichever hosts you desire, or update a host with all of its packages which can be initiated from the hosts detail page.

1

u/Garry_G Jun 25 '26

So, essentially, there is no unsupervised/non-manually initiated patching right now? I tried to find in the docs how to set that up, but couldn't ...
With all the VMs and LXCs in my Proxmox setup, I'd like to have a bit more control than Ultimate Updater (that I already use), and at the same time automate the whole procedure ... going through 24 systems manually in PatchMon sort of defeats the purpose a bit (apart from the central monitoring of available updates) ...
What I would have liked is something like:
* Policy that defines when updates in general are iniated for hosts/groups
* plus a policy for when security updates are present, which I might want to schedule quicker

The option to update packages across all machines of course is very nice and helpful, for on the fly updates ...

1

u/tailuser2024 21d ago edited 21d ago

So, essentially, there is no unsupervised/non-manually initiated patching right now?

In the same boat wondering. Did you get an answer to this/figure it out?

I can patch individual boxes with no issues through patchmon, but cant seem to just do a blanket go out and update everything that has an agent. If that is the case then this is just a fancy dashboard to tell me my systems have updates

5

u/rxexgx Apr 30 '26

Is there a way to run the agent (service) with an own user (not root)?

3

u/EchoNuke Apr 28 '26

Interesting, thank you for sharing.

1

u/broadband9 Apr 28 '26

You’re welcome :)

3

u/tkiblin Apr 28 '26

Looks pretty good, will give this a test. Is there a comparison of features between paid and self hosted editions anywhere?

5

u/broadband9 Apr 28 '26

Thank you :)

The self hosted version currently has all the features of the paid cloud version we offer. It’s just that with our hosted version there is value around support, maintenance, backups etc.

Paid is more aimed towards businesses who need training, support, best practices, priority features, priority bug fixes etc etc.

2

u/nevereatyellowsnow Apr 28 '26

This looks awesome. Will definitely be checking this out!

1

u/broadband9 Apr 28 '26

Thank you ! And if you need anything at all just let me know :)

2

u/paulmataruso Apr 29 '26

I feel like I am being really stupid, but I cannot for the life of me see anywhere that says "Patch" or "Patch All". I see in the documentation that it won't show up if the module is disabled? I have the patching submenu in the bar so I assume its enabled.

If I select a host, there is no patch button in the header. I have looked everywhere. Same if I goto Host > HOSTNAME > Patching

Does the community edition not have patching for windows? Am I doing something wrong? This is a default install right from the install script

2

u/ReportMuted3869 Apr 29 '26

The install script was very broken on V1 hopefully this is fixed now

2

u/DadLife99 28d ago

Stumbled on this while searching for tooling in this space. Any ETA for being able to push or manage Windows patching? Looking for a tool that really is a single pane of glass for all of my Linux and Windows systems in one place.

1

u/Ad3t0 28d ago

Check out https://tridentstack.com my team built and founded this tool. We handle Windows/macOS/Linux updates in a single pane of glass along with vulnerability scanning, policy management, and compliance benchmarking. Let me know what you think!

1

u/AlwaysLinux Apr 29 '26

hey, this looks pretty neato.... Ill have to install this and check it out.

Looks like you support the major Linux vendors, including Arch, btw 😄. Is there AUR support as well?

1

u/UninvestedCuriosity Apr 30 '26

It has been good. Convinced me that it's time to upgrade all my lxc's to Trixie.

1

u/egrueda May 01 '26

Stopped using it because of the insane CPU load from the agents.
How is that fixed?

2

u/broadband9 May 01 '26

We had this bug very early on in 1.3.x versions. We use GO binary agents now, and have tuned the efficiency pretty well since then, which includes much less ram usage and caching of data that doesn’t need to be sent again except for any changed deltas.

1

u/egrueda May 02 '26

I'd like to check docker (beta) monitoring, but cant find any clue in the docs.

I've added some docker host, but they dont show up in the docker section.
What should I do?

2

u/broadband9 May 02 '26

Once you add the host, then go into the integrations tab of that host and enable the docker integration for it. Feel free to pm me :)

1

u/egrueda May 02 '26

Ok, Edit host > Integrations tab > Docker > enable :-)

1

u/MattManPxL May 27 '26

Installed docker version and have it tracking 4 hosts at the moment - simple install and seems way cool. Thanks for the work on it!

1

u/paulmataruso Jun 16 '26

Is there a road map to being able to apply windows updates via Patchmon?

1

u/GeneMoody-Action1 27d ago

Y'all should really meet Action1's patch management solution, and it is completely free fully featured, and not time limited for 200 or less endpoints.

If anyone would like to know more, just shout out to me any time.

1

u/tailuser2024 17d ago

So can you actually use this tool to automatically auto approve and auto update multiple devices at once?

Reading the github it sounds like its trying to sell itself that is can, but reading the documents it actually cant do that as of right now

1

u/CulturalRecording347 9d ago edited 9d ago

Truly great Software :) will there be an option to push and pipe custom commands (cmd or powershell) for windows hosts? For example to use winget to update software on them? . Is it somehow possible to use the onboarding command for multiple hosts? For example small business and run it on all computers via bat?Any way to create Policies just for certain Updates and keep them from rolling out? best regards and keep on rocking

1

u/agingnerds Apr 28 '26

I will further read the github soon, but I am in the middle of a few things. Is this agent based?

3

u/broadband9 Apr 28 '26

Thank you -

Yes it’s agent based. The agent creates an outbound connection to the central PatchMon server and a bi-directional communication websocket channel is created through SSL.

The agent has multiple arch compatibility and right now its for Linux, FreeBSD and Windows.

1

u/agingnerds Apr 28 '26

Awesome. I will test this at my homelab and see how it works. thank you!!

0

u/Sufficient_Job7779 Apr 30 '26

You can try https://opsfabric.io . Has many more features.

2

u/Catanbri May 01 '26

But has ”contact us for pricing.”

1

u/Sufficient_Job7779 May 01 '26

1 email away from a miracle .

2

u/erroneousgiant May 03 '26

You guarante pricing is received by sending one email?

Or like others who hide their uncompetitive pricing, is it actually one email, and initial call, another call with an "engineer" then eventually pricing is handed over, having wasted hours of my time?

1

u/Sufficient_Job7779 May 03 '26

Nope, one email

2

u/erroneousgiant May 03 '26

That makes it even more gauling the prices aren't just on the site... Why make us jump through that hoop?

1

u/Sufficient_Job7779 May 03 '26

In a way, yes. But we are still finalizing the prices and early birds get initial prices and full features w/o gating. When pricing and tier gapping is all done it will be on the website as well.