Patch Manager is currently lacking a major feature that would drive many customers (myself include) towards it. It lacks the ability to make proper reports and alerts off of the patches provided. Be it an issue with integration with WSUS, SCCM, or Orion, what I would like to see is the ability to run a report from Orion when a patch was applied while also creating an alert based upon if it failed. Sure, I can review Asset Inventory after it's been polled (roughly 1 day later), but that's not specifically beneficial to know about a failure at this instance.
In our environment, we have different color coded stages and dates for deployment (Ex. Green Tuesday, Green Thursday, Orange Tuesday, Orange Thursday) as they vary through the weeks. So there is a green week, orange week, red week, etc. The color also indicates importance/severity should a patch impact them negative, which means that say a red server is patched, we need to verify the server and it's applications it hosts are still functioning within X time frame (you wouldn't think one patch could wreck a server until you have applications that must run on very specific versions of X Y or Z). For us, what would be a benefit is to have an alerting structure letting you know when an alert would fail, or be installed.
Our currently potential method is an alert that monitors the Windows Update Service during the patch window, which creates a report showing boot time (if a reboot was required) and if the Windows Update Service stops responding. This is compiled through API scripts that take that information, and the node name, which then uses the node name to correlate to a table which lists the support individual / emails them with that information. Seriously, isn't that long winded?
