LANDesk Patch and Compliance: What does the Gather patch historical information task do?

Question:

What does the Gather patch historical information task do?

What is different from the day to day patch history information?

Is there a canned report that applies?

Answer:

Gather historical is used for both housekeeping (moving, capturing, updating data in patch tables, and also rebuilding indexes) and trending.

When you go into patch and compliance and click on "Patch and Compliance" at the top of the tree, one of the graphs is a "Definition trend info" that can be used to show a definition over time, the interval is determined by when gather historical data is run.

Also inside individual patch vulnerabilities there is a "Trending" tab that shows the same info.

There are no canned reports that use the trending info, its main purpose is for those trending charts.