Tuesday, August 21, 2007

WSUS Approval History Log

The «WSUS Approval History Log» tool allow you to connect remotely to a Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) version 3.0 and get a list of approvals made for updates.

In my organisation we are two WSUS administrators responsible of approving updates. Previously we were manually maintaining a text log of who approved witch update and when. Now I'm using WSUSApprovalHistoryLog, it save me a lot of time every month.

Requirements

To use WSUSApprovalHistoryLog you need :

  • Microsoft .net Framework v2.0
  • A Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) v3.0
  • microsoft.updateservices.administration.dll (this dll gets installed when you install WSUS 3.0 Management Console)

Features

Multilanguage support. If you are using any of the supported language by WSUS 3.0 the update's titles will automatically be display in you current language.

List Approvals since. You can limit your search to include only approvals made since a special date. This is not the date the update's arrival or publication, this is the date the approval action was made.

List all approvals. List all the approvals in the database

Server connection settings. You can specify the server address, port and use of SSL for your WSUS server. Port 8530 and 8531(SSL) were used by default by WSUS 2.0. Port 80 and 443(SSL) are used by default by WSUS 3.0

Saved server connection settings. All server connection settings gets saved in a user.config file

Reset server settings. You can reset all server connection setting by clicking on the big settings button in the upper right corner.

Sorting approvals. By clicking on any column header you can sort the the table accordingly.

Copy to clipboard. You can copy any cells or lines in the table by simply typing CTRL+C

Table column full description. You can move the mouse over any column header to see the full description of it's content.

Automatic Approval actions. You can fin automatic approvals made by the WSUS service by looking for the string "WUS Server" in the "By" column.

Price

It's absolutely FREE ! If you like it just use it.

Download

You can find the latest version here

Version History

Version 1.1Initial release

Limitations

Unfortunately WSUS seems to save only the Install and Remove action information in it's database. When you decline an update, the action is not recorded in the database; so WSUSApprovalHistoryLog can't show you those actions. Event worse, when you decline an update, all approval actions for that update are deleted. Sorry not my fault.

Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation

The code used in this tool is greatly based on the ListApprovedUpdates sample that is part of the Microsoft Windows Server Update Services 3.0 API Code Samples.

The main differences are :

  • The search is based on the list of Approvals not on the list of Updates
  • A DataGridView is used instead of a ListView
  • You can change the server connection parameters
  • You can list all approvals
  • The tool has been renamed WSUSApprovalHistoryLog
  • Support for language localized update's metadata

About me

I'm not a professional developer so be kind, there may be bugs in this tool. But if you gently report them to me I will gladly look at it.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is extremely interesting for me to read this article. Thanks for it. I like such themes and everything connected to them. I would like to read more on that blog soon.

Anonymous said...

Rather cool blog you've got here. Thanx for it. I like such topics and everything connected to this matter. BTW, try to add some pics :).

Anonymous said...

thanks for this tool. would be nice to be able to export, or get more granular, but it was able to help me find out exactly when I approved an update for a group, and that is exactly what I needed!

Anonymous said...

Exactly what I wanted, worked just fine. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

This is such a useful bit of software. It's shocking that MS don't include this function. Thanks for sharing your work like this.

Charles S. said...

This tool is great. I have been using a powershell script to run reports, but this is nice for taking a quick look at approvals.

Anonymous said...

Very good tool !
How to use it with WSUS 4.0 ?