Patchmon – patch monitoring done right

(and how to integrate into your infrastructure monitoring)

PatchMon is a relatively young project that aims to keep an eye on the patch status of the most common Linux distributions, FreeBSD, Windows and Docker containers. The maintainers of PatchMon try to provide a unified view on different approaches to patching and package management. There are several advantages of using PatchMon over for example the Debian or Red Hat update status agent plugins (e.g. for Checkmk), mostly the fact that only a single interface is needed for a growing set of supported operating systems, but also the depth of information provided by PatchMon. So, for many environments it makes more sense to rely on PatchMon provided data than to deploy a plethora of OS or distribution specific plug-ins to your infrastructure monitoring system. This talk shows the general capabilities of PatchMon, the distinction between it and full blown infrastructure monitoring solutions like Checkmk, Icinga, Nagios or Zabbix (in alphabetical order). This clear distinction (only patch stats monitoring, basic notifications and triggering patching) makes integrations necessary. As such practical integrations, the talk showcases the PatchMon special agent for Checkmk together with the related checks and an active check in classical Nagios (or “monitoring-plugins.org” invocation and return specification) with nearly similar scope of functionality.