Hi,
Since yesterday morning, we've been noticing abnormal cpu spikes on many of our windows servers. It's occurring randomly and only lasts for about 5 or 10 mins, then goes away. On a hunch that it might be windows updates, I checked our WSUS server and noticed that the "last report status report" date for each of the affected machines matches very closely to the time when the spike occurred. I have checked %windir%\WindowsUpdate.log on a couple of the machines and the last entry in the file shows something similar to:
2015-07-16 12:28:09:365 872 f34 AU Launched new AU client for directive 'Install Approval', session id = 0x2
Nothing has changed with our WSUS configuration (which is controlled by group policy). Also, our group policy is set to auto download and schedule the install on Sunday mornings....immediate installation disabled....detection frequency disabled.
all that said:
1. what exactly is the log entry that I posted above saying? Is it downloading approved updates? Installing them (it shouldn't be according to our policy)
2. why is this causing cpu spike's?...after reviewing our performance logs for each server (going back 30 days), these servers never have cpu spikes like this.
3. what exactly is the "status report" date showing in wsus and how to control it?
Thanks in advance for any tips!