The patching dashboard has scheduled jobs on the clients (PowerShell scripts on the Windows boxes and Ruby scripts on the Linux boxes). We use Puppet to deploy

The patching dashboard has scheduled jobs on the clients (PowerShell scripts on the Windows boxes and Ruby scripts on the Linux boxes). We use Puppet to deploy the client to our Linux boxes and for Windows we deploy the task and scripts with Group Policy (soon to be replaced by Desired State Configuration). This information isn't something we need to poll often for (and on Windows, there are difficulties interacting with the Windows Update apis remotely). We add and replace servers often, so the client adds themselves to the dashboard, as well as updating their status. We have integrated some reporting into Orion, but that was a side effect of not having the dashboard before.