Patch Management Engine Service or Services Missing

Last Modified

Mon Mar 27 14:40 GMT 2023

Description

  • The Patch Management Engine in N-able N-central 12.2 and newer adds 3 services to the Windows device that are necessary for patching to function.
  • If one or more of these is not present or not running, patches will not install successfully via N-able N-central .

Environment

  • Windows Agents
  • N-able N-central 12.2 and above
  • Patch Management Engine (PME)

Solution

  • These three services must be present for Patch Status V2 to be populated properly, and patches to install:
    • N-able Cache Service Agent in "C:\Program Files (x86)\MspPlatform\FileCacheServiceAgent\FileCacheServiceAgent.exe"
    • N-able PME Agent in "C:\Program Files (x86)\MspPlatform\PME\PME.Agent.exe"
    • N-able RPC Server in "C:\Program Files (x86)\MspPlatform\RequestHandlerAgent\RequestHandlerAgent.exe"
  • If any or all of these are not present, your agent was unable to properly install the Patch Management Engine; there are two main causes for this:
    • Third Party Anti-Virus is interfering with the installation
    • The agent is unable to download the necessary installers from sis.n-able.com
  • If you suspect a third party Anti-Virus software (such as Cylance, Sophos, Symantec, etc) of interfering, please refer to Windows Agent Exclusions for third-party AV products for a list of exclusions to enter.
  • The agent needs unrestricted access to download, especially encrypted zip files containing executables, from sis.n-able.com. This FQDN can resolve to multiple IP addresses, so please add the FQDN to the allow list rather than any single IP address.
  • Once there is nothing blocking the download or installation, the Windows Agent will handle the installation of PME on its own and should be able to self-correct within approximately an hour.
    • If you are still having problems please open a support ticket.