Running a Scheduled Maintenance task

When a Scheduled Maintenance task runs, Scheduled Maintenance generates an incident record, change request, or Request Fulfillment request as though a technician at your service desk created it. Scheduled Maintenance tracks the execution of the incident record, change request, or Request Fulfillment request to store a complete service history for each task.

Verifying a task

After you save a task, you can verify the task (or tasks) that Scheduled Maintenance created using one of these techniques.

• Force a task to execute immediately
• Check the execution history
• Check the execution details of a task

Defining the effect and details of a Scheduled Maintenance task

Scheduled Maintenance enables you to create several types of tasks. When you create a task, Scheduled Maintenance respects all normal default values, sends messages, adheres to Format Control rules, executes macros, and runs the usual validations. If an automatically generated Incident record, change request, or Request Fulfillment request does not match the validation rules, Scheduled Maintenance tries to ignore the validation rules and save the record anyway.

Scheduled Maintenance also enables you to open a collection of Incident records, change requests, or Request Fulfillment requests for every Configuration Item (CI) in Configuration Management that meets certain predefined criteria, or matches a specific user-defined query. Using one of these methods, you can create a maintenance task for any arbitrary subset of Configuration Items.

Incident records for scheduled maintenance tasks

Incident records can specify any of the following.

• Assignment group
• Category
• Expression
• Format control
• Incident description
• Incident title
• Maintained device
• Owner
• Priority code
• Status

Change requests for scheduled maintenance tasks

Change requests can specify any of the following.

• Expressions
• Format control
• Maintained device
• Assignee
• Category
• Coordinator
• Description
• Priority
• Work manager

Request Fulfillment requests for scheduled maintenance tasks

Request Fulfillment requests can specify any of the following.

• Title
• Description
• Category

• Subcategory

• Request Model

• Requester

• Assignee

• Priority
• Coordinator

• Expressions

• Format control

The Scheduled Maintenance Advanced Query option has a built in anti-spam feature. By default, the system generates 50 records, regardless of how many records the advanced query returns. This threshold is user definable under the Administrative Options section of the Scheduled Maintenance Menu.

Regular scheduling

Use this option to select a simple repeat interval or to make a task run at a certain time of day. For example, starting at 11/30/01 00:00:00 execute this task every hour on the hour.

To run a task run at the same time every day, set the start time and then a set a repeat interval of 24 hours. Specify a 24-hour interval with 1 00:00:00, not 24:00:00.

Repeat criteria

Demand based maintenance supports three different types of repeat criteria in an effort to model real-world maintenance activity as effectively as possible:

• Incremental repetition
• Quiescent repetition
• Manual repetition

Repeat criteria limitations

Many fields within Configuration Management that contain numeric values are character fields. This enables you to store unit values with the numeric data. A typical value can be 1,024 MB or 2,000 lbs. Scheduled maintenance can perform comparative operations on these fields by removing non-numeric characters and treating the result as a number. Thus 1,024 MB becomes 1024 when Service Manager compares it to a threshold value.

Scheduled Maintenance does not consider the source of a change when it monitors the requested field on a device. Scheduled Maintenance reacts to any change from an interactive user, a background task, or a remote agent.

It is possible to have multiple demand maintenance tasks linked to the same device. If a single update can trigger more than one demand task, then each task runs independently. You can potentially create two or more maintenance tasks as a result of a single change to a device.

Scheduled Maintenance reacts to changes in the device record, not changes in the maintenance task. If you create or modify a maintenance task that depends on the current state of a monitored record, the task does not run until there is a change to the monitored device.

Task execution results

There are four potential results when you view the execution history of a task.

Error code	Meaning
Success	Executed Successfully. Scheduled Maintenance generated an incident record, change request, or Request Fulfillment request. No errors occurred. This is the result you want to see.
Reject	The incident record or change request was rejected by Format Control. Scheduled Maintenance populates fields in a record as a user would. If a field is required when a user creates an Incident record, change request, or Request Fulfillment request, it is also required when Scheduled Maintenance creates the same incident record, change request, or Request Fulfillment request. If the required information is not available by default, you can use expressions to populate it.
Error	Encountered an Error while executing task expressions. Although you completed the Expressions field on the Details tab of the task, one or more of the expressions did not execute properly. Identify and fix the error.
Error	Encountered an unknown error. An unhandled error occurred inside the Service Manager code, not Scheduled Maintenance Code. This is a very rare event.

Related topics

Scheduled Maintenance

What is a scheduled task?

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