Deployment monitor

[DaveinJP]

Would be great to see some type of screen that showed the status and queue of deployment actions. Things like "what's scheduled", "what's in queue right now", "what succeeded recently", "what failed recently", etc.

Just a thought.

[PeterSchreutelk]

I am currently using PDQ as an ad-hoc deployment tool in a lan with about 3300 clients over +50 sites. PDQ is shareware from Manage-Engine, and already the freeware part gives you exactly the properties that are listed above as "required". I am a happy LanSweeper customer (love what you're doing guys) but the deployment tool indeed seems rather rudimentary - nice if you have nothing else.
@LanSweeper boys & girls, why not look at PDQ and see what you can improve on their model - so far it appears that you're very good at improving on things that are out there but not quite as "the market" wants it

[Bert_D]

Hi,

There is a lot of good stuff suggested here.
We will review everything and see how/when/if we can implement these.

Thanks for your contribution

[Niley]

Ran into some additional items that would be helpful related to deployment monitoring and deployments in general.

1. When you go to reports and filter a report there is an option to Deploy to that filtered report. This is great. However it would be nice if you could have this deploy via a "Scheduled deployment" This once again comes back to easily tracking your grouped deployments. There is an option to do retries, but I'd like to schedule the "report selection" to be an active deployment so that it will catch people as they are scanned.

2. When I go to the deployment screen it allows me to deploy to a report, but I don't think it allows me to deploy to a filtered report.

3. AD Deployments. It would be nice to have an option added to deployments which tied in to AD OU's and would allow you to pick computers. This would be similar to Asset picking, but organized by OU. For instance are ou's are organized by states and cities. If we are doing rolling deployments by state it would great to have an additional option (Active directory) rather than just reports, selection, and groups.

[mshajin]

Niley wrote:
Ran into some additional items that would be helpful related to deployment monitoring and deployments in general.

1. When you go to reports and filter a report there is an option to Deploy to that filtered report. This is great. However it would be nice if you could have this deploy via a "Scheduled deployment" This once again comes back to easily tracking your grouped deployments. There is an option to do retries, but I'd like to schedule the "report selection" to be an active deployment so that it will catch people as they are scanned.

2. When I go to the deployment screen it allows me to deploy to a report, but I don't think it allows me to deploy to a filtered report.

3. AD Deployments. It would be nice to have an option added to deployments which tied in to AD OU's and would allow you to pick computers. This would be similar to Asset picking, but organized by OU. For instance are ou's are organized by states and cities. If we are doing rolling deployments by state it would great to have an additional option (Active directory) rather than just reports, selection, and groups.

+1 for option to schedule deployment on "Deploy Now" screen and deployment to AD OU/groups

[Bert_D]

# of computers deployed. => possible feature
# of successes in job => possible feature
# of Failures in job => possible feature

# Watch deployment in realtime => difficult
Lansweeper's deployment feature is designed to let the client computer do all the heavy lifting.
This however also means that no (or very little) real time data can be gathered while deploying (since its not the server that is doing the actual deployment). We currently only gather the 'end result'.

# You can cancel the deploy on an individual computer in a job during deployment => possible feature
# You can redeploy to failed computers on a per job basis => possible feature
# More detailed logging that is easy to get to and tied to jobs rather than hitting a master log => possible feature

[DaveinJP]

Bert.D wrote:
# of computers deployed. => possible feature
# of successes in job => possible feature
# of Failures in job => possible feature

# Watch deployment in realtime => difficult
Lansweeper's deployment feature is designed to let the client computer do all the heavy lifting.
This however also means that no (or very little) real time data can be gathered while deploying (since its not the server that is doing the actual deployment). We currently only gather the 'end result'.

# You can cancel the deploy on an individual computer in a job during deployment => possible feature
# You can redeploy to failed computers on a per job basis => possible feature
# More detailed logging that is easy to get to and tied to jobs rather than hitting a master log => possible feature

I guess what I'm really looking for is a list of all machines a particular job was run against and a status for each:

JOB NAME

SYSTEMS IT WAS RUN ON RESULT AS OF
system1 Success 1/1/2015 00:01:23
system2 Failure 1/1/2015 00:01:45
system3 Pending 1/1/2015 00:01:52
~~~

and so on.

[Niley]

I think there are a lot of things that could be added around deployment monitoring. Another product we use for deployment give us a ton of information on all of our deployments and it's easy to get to the data.

Here are the types of things you can see per job.
# of computers deployed.
# of successes in job
# of Failures in job
Watch deployment in realtime (this is key)
-You can see what step each computer is on. ie: step 2 (copy file), Step 3 installing, dns issue, etc
-You can see the speed of the copy (This becomes important when you see a computer is only copying at 2k/sec)
-You can cancel the deploy on an individual computer in a job during deployment
-You can redeploy to failed computers on a per job basis
More detailed logging that is easy to get to and tied to jobs rather than hitting a master log

I know that deployments is a new feature and is still being development. We are hopeful to be able to switch our deployments to Lansweeper, we just can't with the current feature set.

[Susan_A]

Scheduled deployments are listed under Deployment\Schedules and deployment logs can be found under Deployment\Logs or Deployment\<server name>. We're not sure additional pages would really be necessary. You can already filter the logs to list successful/unsuccessful deployments. You can also build custom reports based on the tsysPackageLogs database table to list the information you are after.

[DaveinJP]

Susan.A wrote:
Scheduled deployments are listed under Deployment\Schedules and deployment logs can be found under Deployment\Logs or Deployment\<server name>. We're not sure additional pages would really be necessary. You can already filter the logs to list successful/unsuccessful deployments. You can also build custom reports based on the tsysPackageLogs database table to list the information you are after.

Deployment\Logs or Deployment\<server name> works great if you have one or two servers; I have 38. Not quite as easy to aggregate data.