Centralised Task Scheduling/reporting (for Windows)?

[pete]

What (if anything) are you using to centralise / report on / control scheduled tasks at your organisation?

 

For Windows I've found......System Center Orchestrator, maybe Puppet/Ansible/Salt and a few abandoned bits and bobs.

 

I can report on remote tasks using schtasks and/or Powershell. But what I'd like is one server dishing out tasks so if we need to amend something it's all in one place.

[jthompson]

Came across you post late, but though I'd share this.

We monitor Scheduled Tasks on all our Windows servers using Check_MK (built on Nagios). It won't let you manage, control or add/remove tasks, it'll just monitor their status and alert you if any hit a problem. We still have to go back to Task Scheduler on the relevant Windows machine to manage tasks and see all their detail.

[pete]

^ I've got Check_MK bolted into Icinga here, but hadn't spotted the scheduled task functionality.

 

That looks like (based on how few tasks are in the screenshot per server) you can filter for specific tasks you care about, or it is pulling all user-created tasks?

[jthompson]

I've looked again at how those services in the screenshot are configured. Those ones are actually done using a separate plugin: as well as the Check_MK agent, the servers also have the NSClient++ agent, along with a plugin check for Windows tasks. The parameters of those services tell them to ignore certain tasks (e.g. anything under the 'Microsoft' tree in Task Scheduler, which is full of the standard system stuff). That's why the total numbers of tasks are so low in that screenshot.

 

In Check_MK, I've got is configured as a 'Classical active and passive Monitoring check' as follows:

 

 

Check_MK itself can also check Windows tasks. It presents them individually rather than as a combined total. This is an example of some of the tasks presented when inventorying one of our servers. I can pick which of these I want to be monitoring.

 

Edited June 23, 2017 by jthompson