Update the Forwarders in a Group

You can push a forwarder version to every Windows and macOS asset in a group from the Stairwell console, without repackaging an installer or touching a host. Open the group, view its assets, choose the target version per operating system, review what the update will do, and confirm. Linux forwarders are not upgraded this way and must be upgraded through your package manager.

Doing this by group rather than by selecting assets is what makes a staged upgrade one action: a group of pilot hosts first, then the rest.

How do I push an update to a group?

1. Log in to app.stairwell.com.
2. Open Settings, and under Environments open Asset groups.
3. Select the environment containing the group.
4. Open the group: click the ... icon under Actions and select Edit.
5. Click View assets to switch from the group's settings to its asset list.
6. Click Update assets.
7. In the Update Software dialog, pick a target version. Versions are listed per operating system, newest first, with the newest marked [Latest Version] and selected for you. View Older Versions expands the full list if you need to land on a specific build.
8. Click Next. This is the review step, described below.
9. Read the review, then click Update.

The dialog title carries the number of assets in scope, so check that count before you confirm. It is the fastest way to notice you are about to update the wrong group.

What does the review step tell me?

Clicking Next does not start the upgrade. It runs the update as a dry run against the assets in scope and reports what would happen, including which assets cannot be updated and why.

Read it for two things:

• Assets that cannot take the update. A machine already on the target version, one whose operating system you did not choose a version for, or one whose platform is not supported for over-the-air upgrades. These are reported rather than silently dropped.
• The counts. If every asset in scope is reported as invalid, the Update button stays disabled, which is the product telling you there is nothing to do rather than letting you queue a no-op.

This step exists because an upgrade across a group is hard to take back. Spend the ten seconds.

Which platforms can be updated this way?

The Update Software dialog shows a version list only for the platforms present in the group and supported. A group of Linux hosts offers nothing to select, and a mixed group offers Windows and macOS versions and quietly leaves the Linux assets alone.

For Linux, see Install on Linux with apt, which makes an upgrade an apt install --only-upgrade, or Install on Linux with a Script for the package-based path. A dynamic group filtered on forwarder version is still useful for Linux: it tells you which hosts your package tooling has not reached yet.

How do I update assets that are not in a group?

From the Assets page, which has the same dialog behind two other entry points:

• One asset, or a few. Select them, right-click, and choose Update.
• Everything matching the current filters. Use the Update assets button in the header. It reads as Update assets (All) with no selection and Update assets (N) with one, and it operates on the query rather than on a page of results. Filter first, and check the count in the dialog title before confirming.

Both require administrator access and a single environment in scope. The button is disabled when more than one environment is selected, because an upgrade is an environment-scoped action.

How long does it take, and how do I know it worked?

The upgrade is asynchronous. Confirming in the dialog schedules it; it does not perform it. Hosts pick the update up on their own schedule, download the package, and apply it, and an upgrade that was scheduled successfully can still fail later on the host.

So verify by version, not by the absence of an error:

1. On the Assets page, show the forwarder version column and filter to the group.
2. Watch the versions move to the target over the following hours. Machines that are off, asleep, or on a slow link take longer.
3. Any host still on the old version after a reasonable window is a host to look at individually, not a reason to re-push to the whole group.

A dynamic group filtered on forwarder version is the tool for this. It empties itself as the fleet converges, which is a much better progress indicator than a spreadsheet.

What should I know before I upgrade a fleet?

• Stage it. Push to a small group first, confirm those hosts report the new version and keep collecting, then continue. Grouping the fleet is what makes this cheap.
• The console installs the bundled Windows package. It includes the .NET runtime libraries current at the time of that forwarder release. If your hosts were originally installed from the standalone MSI, an upgrade from the console still succeeds, and you may see two entries in the Windows Control Panel afterwards. That is expected and does not affect operation. If you would rather avoid it, stay consistent with the installer type you started with and upgrade out of band.
• Very old Windows forwarders may need a stepping stone. Builds old enough to predate the current upgrade mechanism cannot upgrade directly to a current release, and one of them has anti-tamper behavior that prevents a self-upgrade. If a host is several major versions behind and the update will not take, ask Stairwell support for the path from that specific version rather than guessing.
• macOS out-of-band updates need maintenance mode. The macOS forwarder's tamper protection blocks an uninstall or an out-of-band replacement until the forwarder is put into maintenance mode with a token generated from the console. Upgrading from the console avoids all of that, which is the main reason to prefer it.
• Upgrading takes real time on the host. The dialog says so, and it is true: this is a download and a service replacement, not a configuration change.

What should I read next?

• Manage Groups, for building the pilot group and the dynamic group that tracks version drift.
• Forwarder Downloads, for the current version per platform and its release notes.
• Groups and Policies, for what else a group lets you do to a set of machines at once.