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Installing Cloud Agents for Patch Management

Agent installations are managed in Cloud Agent (CA).

Let's get started!

Choose CA (Cloud Agent) from the app picker.

What are the steps?

Create an activation key. Go to Activation Keys, and click New Key. Enter the title of the key. Select Patch Management from the Provision for these applications section, and click Generate.

As you can see, you can provision the same key for any of the other applications in your account. To understand the license numbers, see About Available License Count.

Download Installer

Based on your preference, click Install instructions next to Windows (.exe), Linux (.rpm), or Mac (.pkg )

As an example, refer to the following screenshot:

Review the installation requirements and click Download

You'll run the installer on each system from an elevated command prompt, or use a systems management tool or Windows group policy.

Your agents should start connecting to our cloud platform.

For Windows agent:

For Linux agent, to enable patch installation on Linux assets, ensure the following:

- The Agent must be running with root user or as sudo user. You can configure users by using the Agent configuration tool.

- For RHEL 6 and 7, the supported Cloud Agent version is 4.0 and later.

- For RHEL 8, CentOS 6 and 7, the supported Cloud Agent version is 4.6 and later.

- For Oracle Linux 6, 7, 8, Amazon Linux, and Amazon Linux 2 the supported Cloud Agent Version is 4.8 and later.

- Supported YUM file version 3.2.29.

- YUM file must be configured with debugloglevel >= 2 Default is 2.

- The YUM file is configured with correct proxy settings.

- The endpoint is subscribed for active Red Hat subscriptions.

- For Ubuntu Linux 18, 20, and 21, and Debian 9, 10, and 11 the supported Cloud Agent version is 4.9 and later.

   If the proxy is configured for a machine, then add the same proxy: /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/proxy.conf

   Example:

   Acquire::http::Proxy "http://<<proxy_ip_address>>:<<port>>"

   Acquire::https::Proxy "https://<<proxy_ip_address>>:<<port>>"

For Mac agent, ensure the following:

-    Mac agent binary 4.25 or later for x64, x86_64, and binary 4.26 or later for arm64 architecture. Contact your Technical Account Manager (TAM) to get these binaries.

You can deploy patches that are available in the following operating system repositories:
-    macOS 10.15 Catalina
-    macOS 11 Big Sur
-    macOS 12 Monterey
-    macOS 13 Ventura (3rd party and OS security update)

Your host must be able to reach your Qualys Cloud Platform (or the Qualys Private Cloud Platform) over HTTPS port 443. On the Qualys Cloud Platform, go to Help > About to see the URL your host needs to access. For more information about connectivity requirements/proxy settings refer to the platform specific Cloud Agent Installation Guides available on https://www.qualys.com/documentation/.

Enable Cloud Agent to Download Patches

To ensure that the Cloud Agents can successfully download patches, you must add the download URLs to the allowlist. Click here to refer to the list of URLs that you must add to the allowlist.

Activate your agents for PM

Go to the Agents tab, and from the Quick Actions menu of an agent, click "Activate for FIM or EDR or PM or SA". (Bulk activation is supported using the Actions menu).

For Linux assets, you also need to activate Vulnerability Management (VM) along with PM because the missing patches for Linux assets are derived from the vulnerability scan performed by the agent.

Click "Activate Agent" and activate VM to see the missing patches for Linux assets on the Patch Management UI.

Activate PM in a CA configuration profile

Create a new CA configuration profile for Patch Management and then assign the CA configuration profile for your cloud agents. On the PM tab, toggle “Enable PM module for this profile” to ON.

Note: You must add tags to include assets that need to be licensed. You can apply patches to the licensed assets only.

You're ready!

Select PM from the application picker and then create a deployment job to start installing patches on your assets.