I work at a small managed services provider using an all-in-one RMM platform for monitoring, ticketing, automation, and patching. I created a remote patching policy intended for our internal test group and one cooperative client. During the cloning and scoping process, I accidentally selected the global folder and enabled automatic approval and deployment. There was no maintenance window or staggered rollout, so the policy ran overnight against production endpoints for all 12 clients. By morning, the ticket queue was overwhelmed: a legacy accounting application stopped working, some VPN drivers disappeared, and one client's older print server patch caused a reboot in the middle of invoicing. My manager took it as a hard lesson about balancing automation with control. Has anyone dealt with a similar incident, and what safeguards did you put in place afterward?
3 Answers
Use rings instead of a single broad rollout: one or two test machines, a small canary group, then additional clients in stages. For an MSP, you may not be able to build a parallel environment for every customer, but staggering clients so only a manageable fraction can be affected by a bad patch gives you time to stop and investigate. Keep production collections out of default targets and require an explicit maintenance-window or approval tag.
Most administrators eventually get an incident like this: mass reboots, an accidental operating-system upgrade, or a patch rollout that takes down a critical service. The important part is how you respond afterward. Be transparent with the affected clients, help restore service, and turn the incident into concrete controls such as canary deployments, pre- and post-change checks, detailed logging, backups, and a documented rollback plan. If your manager is treating it as a lesson rather than hiding it, use that opportunity to improve the whole process.
Change management would help, but it cannot replace a technical safeguard because a bad change can still be approved. Have a second person review the scope, require a ticket and maintenance window, and verify the resolved device count before enabling deployment. A short pause and fresh pair of eyes can prevent a very long night.
Exactly. The maintenance window only controls when the failure happens; the scope filter controls how many systems are affected. Both need to be checked independently.