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Monitor Windows Task Schedular

I am loooking for a way to monitor and display each of my Windows Servers scheduled tasks within Orion on the Server node page. Is there way to do this and then be alerted if a new task is created or fails.

I am not sure APM or the new version SAM can do this or Orion or LEM for that matter.

Anyone that can point me in the right direction or create a Context Exchange script or monitor I would be greatly appreciative.

I have opened a ticket on this Case #310538. Have not heard anything from support as of yet on this.

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bobross

C:\Windows\Tasks contains the Windows Task scheduler items, so you should be able to monitor that folder to check for the addition of any new tasks.

There is also a log file at C:\Windows\SchedLgU.txt for scheduled tasks. Refer to How to troubleshoot scheduled tasks in Windows XP and in Windows Server 2003 for some additional information on this log file. You should also check out the 'schtasks' command which will provide a text response that can be parsed.

From the above items you should be able to put together a few scripts that will grab whatever information you want.

profzoom1

Thanks much but now how do I get the below item to display on the server node page? That is what I would like to see and this is beyond me to figure out how to get that to where it would be availble on the server node page in Orion.

"You should also check out the 'schtasks' command which will provide a text response that can be parsed"

bobross

You'd need to create a new template with a Windows Script component. With VBScript you should be able to use wshshell.exec to run the schtasks command. I haven't played around with the command itself too much, but it looks like you should be able to run a query against one particular task. Once you have the response you can use VBScript's string and/or regular expression functions to grab the status code and last run date/time.

Once the template is created just add it to the node. If you want multiple tasks monitored you can either duplicate the component inside the template or make copies of the template.

Does that clear things up for you?

profzoom1

All the way up until you mentioned me creating the script with VBScript, it all made sense to that point.

Sorry but when mentioning scripting I lock up and can't do it or takes me forever to get anything that works. A big area that I am not comfortable doing or attempting unless it is just changing someone else's scripts but creating them from scratch not going to be able to do it not even sure where to start on that.

If it is too much to ask for someone out here to take care of creating that piece than I will not be able to do this.

Thanks much for anyone wanting to create this!!!

bobross

I spent some time working on this, but its looking more and more like we won't be able to pull meaningful data from remote computers without some creative temp files.

So far I've found that there is a WMI object Win32_ScheduledJob, but this only includes tasks that were created using WMI and does not include information about tasks that were created manually using the "Add Scheduled Task" wizard (or even information about tasks created with WMI then later modified through the GUI). On a side note, this object does allow for the creation of scheduled tasks and maybe the folks in charge of the unmanage utility could incorporate this to make scheduling unmanage windows a less manual process.

Moving on I attempted to run the schtasks, but unfortunately Windows scripts run locally on the Solarwinds box (as opposed to the Linux scripts which run on the remote box). I do have a script right now that can be used to monitor scheduled tasks on the Solarwinds server and seems to be working just fine. The only problem is that if you attach it to another node it is still only retrieving information from the Solarwinds server itself. Even using the command line switches that allow for pulling data from a remote computer don't seem to be returning meaningful data.

The last idea I had was to parse the SchedLgU.txt log file, but I found that the log flie overwrites entries once it reaches a certain size. This will cause all sorts of zany behavior if you have a lot of tasks or even if you just have a few tasks that run weekly and one or two that run more frequently.

If I have some downtime today I'll play around a bit with running a remote script on the target computer then writing to a tmp file and having Solarwinds read the contents of the tmp file. This may or may not work out too well.

Its very unfortunate because the WMI object is the best tool to use for this, but Microsoft in its infinite wisdom decided to make it all but useless for data gathering.

Update: It appears that Vista/Server 2008 and above have a Schedule.Service object that could be leveraged to provide details of all scheduled tasks. All of our Windows servers are 2k3, so I'm not able to work with this myself. This would also only be limited to those environments that are running Solarwinds on 2k8+ servers. Going to keep playing with running the script remotely and see what I can come up with.