The disclosure provides an approach for recommending and installing a patch onto a first computing device, comprising: parsing a machine-readable document for a property variable and a possible value of the property variable, wherein the combination of the property variable and the possible value represents a criticality of installing the patch; transmitting a request to the first computing device for a first value of the first computing device, the first value representing a state of the first computing device corresponding to the property variable; receiving the first value; comparing the possible value to the first value; based on the comparing, performing a first determination of the criticality of installing the patch onto the first computing device; and based on the criticality of installing the patch, installing the patch onto the first computing device.