Description

Agent tasks can be created and stored on the Controller Gateway to be run on-demand or by a CRONTAB schedule.

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[00:00] To perform tasks on an agent, we need to go to the controllers gateway webpage. And to the configure section. And to the gateway tasks page. So under this Enterprise Administration section here, we have tasks, agent tasks. If you click on that, you can see here these are all the tasks on the gateway. We can click on the 'create new gateway task' to add a new one. And then, you can see here we have a list. And there's nine of them so far. Of all the different tasks that you can do inside of the agents. We have things like activate, update, and unactivate licenses. We can collect backups. We can restore a backup. Or we can install modules or even restart a particular agent. And we can even send project or project resources. So I'm going to choose the 'collect backup' to give you a good example here. And hit 'next'. And then, you can see we have this schedule for it. And this is where we can really do a lot of interesting work. You can name it whatever you want. And you can either execute it immediately and then it'll go away. You can say 'execute on demand' and that will allow users to go and select it and say 'execute now'. You can say "I want it to execute just one time", but instead of immediately, tell it a specific time to run. The 'execute once, delayed' means the same thing as 'execute immediately' except for it will delay a certain number of seconds. And then the 'execute on schedule'. This is the one that's a little bit more special. And you can see that we have these common settings here, and you can select any one of these guys. And the values that are in parentheses here are actually a crontab string. So once per hour just means on minute zero of every hour, every day, every month, every day of week. You can do it twice per day, right? So you have the zero zero comma twelve. You say 'once per day, zero minute, zero hour'. Well that would be midnight. And so on. Lots of different options here. But if you pick any one of them, then you can see that everything below it changes, right? So we have our minutes, hours, days, months and weekdays. And then, we've got all the different values for them. And you can set these to anything that you want. And I'm going ahead and say 'once per day'. So at midnight every day. And then, you can see the expression descriptor here, at zero zero AM. I'll click 'next'. And now I get to choose where I want to collect the backup from. In this case, I just have the one agent, but you can do it from a whole group, which means if you add agents to that group, they will automatically get added into the task. Or you can pick individual agents. And if you have multiple groups, they'll all show up here. Right, click on 'next'. Then you can change whatever settings that are relevant to this task. In this case, we're going to force a backup, right? So it says "The controller will not take "a scheduled backup if the agent's internal database "has not changed", all right? So if you choose 'force backup' to be true, that means even if nothing is new, take the backup anyways. So I'm going to set that to true, and then hit 'finish'. And now, you can see under our gateway tasks here, we have one called 'collect backup', and it is repeating. There's the next scheduled time it's going to run. And it's currently in the scheduled state. And what group it's going to go against. And I can either edit it or delete it or I can click on this 'run now'. Once you have these tasks, we can come over to the status page here. And then, you can see down towards the bottom here, we have this gateway tasks section. And then here is our collect backup. And the information about it. And, if it were in progress, then you would see this progress indicator here. All right, and if you're doing many different agents, say, you're a group and holds a hundred agents, then the progress can be quite important, because it might take a while.

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