The Reporting Challenge in Patch Management
Patch management has traditionally been dominated by reporting requirements, with approximately 40% of all feature requests focused on analytics and reporting capabilities. Organizations face constant demands for audit trails, compliance documentation, and remediation status updates from multiple stakeholders. The challenge extends beyond simple deployment tracking to include device-based views, patch-specific status reports, operational troubleshooting data, and increasingly, exposure-based reporting that aligns with security team requirements. This session addresses these challenges by demonstrating Ivanti Neurons' comprehensive reporting framework that provides nine out-of-the-box reports covering device status, patch deployment, operational metrics, and vulnerability-based analytics.
Four Critical Reporting Perspectives
Ivanti has identified four essential pivot points that drive reporting needs across organizations. First, device-based reporting provides visibility into what's missing or installed on specific endpoints, including installation dates and associated vulnerabilities. Second, patch-based reporting enables tracking of specific updates across the environment, critical for monitoring zero-day responses or monthly OS updates. Third, operational reporting delivers deep deployment diagnostics including failure codes and error details, essential for cross-team collaboration when patching complex business applications. Fourth, and most strategically significant, is CVE-based reporting that allows security teams to track vulnerabilities across multiple platforms and applications from a single query, eliminating the need to manually correlate patches across different systems.
Dashboard Designer Flexibility
Beyond canned reports, Ivanti Neurons offers a dashboard designer that enables custom analytics without requiring SQL knowledge or complex data manipulation. The platform provides preprocessed, joined datasets covering device patch scans and deployment history, allowing users to create visualizations through simple drag-and-drop operations. Users can build bar charts showing top devices with missing patches, pie charts breaking down exploit types, time-series views of deployment trends, and detailed tables of failed deployments within specific timeframes. The system supports natural language time filtering, allowing queries like 'last 12 hours' without manual date calculations, and offers flexible aggregation options including counts, sums, and maximums across multiple dimensions.
Exposure-Based Compliance and ROI Tracking
The platform introduces a maintenance report that shifts focus from operational metrics to business value demonstration. Rather than measuring compliance from deployment start to finish dates, the system calculates exposure windows from patch release dates to installation dates, providing true risk exposure metrics. This approach has proven successful in FDIC audits with banking customers and enables IT teams to demonstrate the impact of operational changes like weekly browser updates or zero-day response programs. Organizations can track how many patches were deployed, vulnerabilities resolved, and known exploited vulnerabilities remediated over 90-day, 180-day, or annual periods, providing concrete evidence for justifying process improvements and resource investments.
