[00:00] In this lesson, we'll learn the basics of creating agent task and managing their schedules. With an enterprise setup, you can easily run task on multiple agents from the controller gateway by going to the network tab and clicking on the agent task page. This initial tab shows all of the available task, and currently there are none. To create a new one, we can click on the create task button. We're presented with this extensive list, and we're only able to select one task. Here I'll choose to collect a backup, which downloads a backup file from our selected agent. Next, we're able to create a schedule and there's five different options we can choose. Going from the top down, the task can run immediately after completing the wizard or on demand at our own discretion. We can execute once at a specific date and time or after a time period. Finally, we can set up a repeating task with the scheduled option. This is built using a cron tab expression, which gives granularity to the schedule. There's many prebuilt ones like once per hour or once per day, but you can also create your own using the custom selection.

[01:07] Let's say I want to run this task every 1rst and 15th day of the month at midnight. I'll set my minutes and hours at zero to represent midnight, and for the days I want the 1rst and 15th, which I can enter in here and separate them with a comma. Finally, I'll add an asterisk to the months and weekdays fields, and this applies the schedule to every month, and it runs regardless of what day of the week it is. Below this video, I've included a link to the user manual page for how to use cron tab expressions so you can build your own schedules. One additional note here is that we can change the name of the schedule, but by default it's set to the name of the task. We can click on next to select the agent to run the task on. You can select by the agent or the agent group, and if you have more agents connected, you could select all of them. I just have the one here, so after I choose it, I'll click on next. Now we're presented with a settings page related to backup collection. Depending on what task you chose, you'll have different settings presented to you. We have this one for a limitation on the number of backups that can be concurrently requested.

[02:04] I'll leave it set to zero, providing no limitation, and click on next. Finally, we're presented with the summary of what we chose, and this presents the opportunity to go back if we need to make any additional changes. But if all looks good here, we can click on the create agent task button, and now we can see the collect backup task is available, and there's more options here by clicking on this button. Some notable ones being able to edit the task again, review it's summary, running the task now, instead of on a schedule and deleting a task. I'll include a link to the user manual page going over all of these options in more detail as there are some considerations to make when using them, especially with things like the Run Now option, which will alter any schedule. The running schedule tab shows all tasks that are currently running or scheduled for the future. My backup collection is scheduled for a future date, so it shows up here in the scheduled task, and clicking on the more options button lets us pause any execution or cancel the task entirely. Finally, the history tab gives us a detailed view of every task that has been run and whether or not they have succeeded or failed.

[03:04] So if you want to run a task for one or multiple agents, then you can do that from the agent tasks page, as well as be able to create the schedule you need, effectively manage them and view their status.