We have different products the the company hosts and they require that servers be patched on Test servers prior to a code release. Once the the servers are tested then the same set of patches should be deployed to the production servers during a scheduled time when the code is released to the production servers. And that is the case for other products but the cycle between the product is always different. So we always want test group be product match the production group by product. What is the best solution to implement for this type of environment to be able to approve any missing update to the test group for a product and when time comes how to push the same updates to production groups.
The way I have it seems messy because i have bunch of nested groups by datacenter > product name > purpose of the server "wether it is QA webserver, prod webserver, dev webserver, other servers,
etc... and what i do is from Update Reports, run "Update Status Summary" report on the test group that has a status of "Needed, Failed, No Status" and from there approve the updates to that test group. Install the updates, etc... and then
when I want to deploy the updates to certain groups, I run the "Updated Tabular Status for Approved Updates", select the same test group that was deployed to and the option "Installed/NotApplicable, Needed" and approve to the Production
group. Seems like I am doing this all wrong. Appreciate the help. Thanks.