OS Patch Management feature - reports important security updates available for instances after running patch job

Question

I have set up 3 CentOS 7 VMs to test out the OS patch management feature that is now available in GCP. I deployed the patch manager agent and the Patch Management console reports all 3 VMs have "Important / security updates available". I then scheduled a Patch deployment job for CentOS and it ran on all 3 machines.

When I check the logs, I can see that the task began at the scheduled time and reports "No packages to update".

An hour later, the dashboard still reports: "Important / security updates available".

I have rebooted the VMs and the dashboard still has not changed and it shows 100% of the VMs requiring patching.

While I suspect that there really IS no security update available, I am not sure how we can trust the dashboard. Further, there are no hyperlinks available for more information about what these important/security updates are so how would you even know what fixes were going to be applied if there were any?

Answer 1

I was able to reproduce this error in my own project.

I created a VM Instance with CentOS 7, then I created a new patch development, It is worth mentioning that I used 'Minimal and Security updates’ on the Patch Config menu:

Then I received the same message:

But I was able to fix it.

I have found the following documentation: What is included in an OS patch job?

Where it is mentioned that:

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Centos operating systems, you can apply all or select from the following updates:

• System updates
• Security updates

So I created another patch development, but in this case, I didn’t select the ‘Minimal and Security updates’ I just kept it blank, in this way its select the default value, and it applies all the updates instead of only the minimal and security updates.

And it worked.