System Tasks

FlexNet Manager Suite 2019 R2 (On-Premises Edition)

FlexNet Manager Suite displays the System Tasks page when you navigate to the system menu ( in the top right corner) and select System Health > System Tasks, or when you click the colored indicators on the navigation bar (top right). Your account needs the Troubleshooting: access to System Tasks page privilege to view this page.

Choosing what is visible

The items listed on this page are filtered by the settings at the top left:
  • The Tasks run in the last drop-down list enables you to select the age of the tasks that appear on this page. For example, if you select 30 days, FlexNet Manager Suite displays only those system tasks that are not older than 30 days in the system.
  • The Only show last run drop-down list enables you to limit the records for recurring system tasks. The default value of this field is Yes, which restricts this page to show details of only the latest execution of a recurring system task. For example, if a discovery and inventory rule has been scheduled to run every day, this page would display the status of the latest execution of the rule.
You can also apply additional filters to restrict the number of records on this page. For more information about using filters, see the topics under Using Lists in FlexNet Manager Suite. The Save view as feature of FlexNet Manager Suite enables you to create customized management views of a page by saving the applied user interface settings. For more information, see Creating Management Views.
Tip: The Task monitoring section under My Preferences page enables you to customize the task types for which FlexNet Manager Suite displays the color-coded notifications in the navigation bar. This setting does not affect the records on the System Tasks page.

Understanding the display

The page displays the status of various system-level tasks that are either completed or in progress, and match the above filter settings. A task name may describe the task (for example, Reconciliation), or it may identify more details about the task (for example, an Inventory import is named for the inventory source, such as FlexNet Manager Suite for the import of FlexNet inventory).

Each task (such as a discovery and inventory rule, or an inventory import) is broken down into either sub-tasks or steps. For example, for a discovery and inventory rule execution task that targets devices managed by four different inventory beacons, FlexNet Manager Suite creates four sub-tasks, one for each inventory beacon. Each of these sub-tasks has separate steps for the required system-level activities (for example, discovery completed).

To view the sub-tasks and steps associated with a task, you can click the + icon to the left of the task name.

FlexNet Manager Suite displays the status of each sub-task or step, along with a brief summary.
Tip: The summary from the last step attempted is repeated as the summary for its parent task. This means that you can assess success or failure without needing to expand the parent task until you want to investigate further.

Digging deeper

For the following task types, you can click the task name to view its details on the appropriate page.

Table 1.
When you click this task type FlexNet Manager Suite displays the For more details, see
Business imports Business Data tab of the Data Inputs page Business Data Tab
Inventory imports Inventory Data tab of the Data Inputs page Inventory Data Tab
Discovery and inventory rule Rule Execution Details page. Rule Execution Details

Some tasks or steps provide log files. In these cases, you can click Download log to download the log file for the step or sub-task. This feature is available if your operator account has the Troubleshooting: Advanced access and log downloads administrative privilege. For more details about changing permissions for an account, see Account Properties and Creating a Role.

Available properties

This page displays the following read-only task properties, listed here in alphabetical order. Some of these are displayed by default, and the remainder are available in the column chooser:

Table 2. Properties on the System Tasks page
Property Description
Beacon

Shows the name of an inventory beacon involved in this task. One or more inventory beacons may be involved in a task.

Editable in the General tab of the inventory beacon properties.
Connection type
The type of the connection used for this task. It can have any of the following values:
  • Altiris (now known as Symantec IT Management Suite)
  • App-V Standalone
  • Bladelogic Client Automation
  • BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (now known as BMC Discovery)
  • Citrix XenApp (EdgeSight)
  • Citrix XenApp (Server Agent) (also know as XenApp server agent)
  • Exchange ActiveSync
  • FNMEA
  • HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping Inventory (DDMI)
  • HP Universal Discovery (now known as HPE Universal Discovery)
  • ILMT
  • ILMT SQL
  • ManageSoft (for FlexNet inventory)
  • Microsoft Office 365
  • SAP
  • SMS (now known as SCCM)
  • Spreadsheet
  • Tivoli Endpoint Manager (now known as IBM BigFix).

You cannot currently filter for these values.

Created by The name of the user who started this task or step.

Not editable.
End date

The date and time when this step or task was completed.

Not editable.
Logs Displays a link to download the log file (if any) for this step.

Not editable.
Server name The name of the inventory beacon or central application server where this task or step is running.
Start date

The date and time when this step or task was initiated.

Not editable.
Status
The status of this step or system task. It can have any of the following values:
  • Completed
  • Completed with errors
  • Failed
  • In progress
  • In progress with errors
  • Pending
  • Scheduled
  • Skipped
  • Started
  • Timed out
  • Unknown.
    Tip: An overnight clean-up process marks any individual step as timed out if it has already been running for more than 24 hours. The parent system task is marked as timed out as soon as any individual child step has timed out.

Not editable.
Summary

A more detailed summary of the task. The summary information depends on the task type. For example, for a discovery and inventory rule execution task, this field displays the number of beacons reported and the task status like in progress, completed, completed with errors, or timed out. For purchase order upload tasks, it shows the details of the total number of purchases created as a result of the upload. You may also notice the See details link for some tasks. You can click this link to view a detailed summary of activities performed within that task.

Not editable.
Task/Step
The name of the system task. For example, if the task type is a Discovery and inventory rule, the rule name is displayed as task name and if the task type is Purchase Order Upload, the name of the upload file is displayed as task name. If a task involves multiple sub-tasks, FlexNet Manager Suite displays a + icon before the task name. You can click the + icon to expand the task details. For example, a reconciliation task would have a sub-task to import the inventory information and another one to reconcile the licenses.
Tip: The number of steps may depend on context. For example, if an Inventory import task runs on your central application server (including on an inventory beacon co-installed on the same server), it has three child steps. If the same task runs on a remote inventory beacon, it has five steps by default, with the additional steps covering the upload processes from the inventory beacon to the application server.

See also the note below this table.

Not editable.
Task type
The type of the system task. It can have any of the following values:
  • Active Directory
  • ARL import
  • Business import
  • Data warehouse export
  • Discovery and Inventory rule
  • Enterprise group one-off upload
  • Inventory import
  • Purchase order one-off upload
  • PVU Import
  • Reconciliation
  • SAP import
  • User assignment one-off upload.

Not editable.
Note: For inventory imports running through a remote inventory beacon (one that is installed elsewhere than on your central application server), the Inventory import task is named for the inventory connection, and by default contains these five steps:
  • Gathering inventory data covers the collection of inventory information from Flexera inventory collection technologies and third-party sources
  • Uploading to Application Server covers the transfer process across the network
  • Import into staging covers saving the uploaded inventory data in staging tables that are separate from the operational tables in the compliance database (and consequently, the inventory data is not yet visible in the web interface for FlexNet Manager Suite)
  • Import inventory devices covers the move from the staging tables to the operational tables (after which the information about inventory device hardware is available in the web interface, but the impact of this new information on license consumption is not yet visible)
  • Reconcile software licenses recalculates the license consumption figures based on the latest imported inventory data (so that now all inventory data and its impact on license consumption is fully available).
The process through these five steps is commenced by the schedule you configured on each inventory beacon for collecting inventory (normally one schedule for each separate data source). This is reported as the Gathering inventory data step. Completion of each step then normally triggers the next in the sequence. However, this can have a downside: license reconciliations are resource intensive, and, even though only one can be run at a time, running them as soon as possible after every kind of inventory import from any source can impact system performance for other tasks.
For this reason, it is possible to separate the above process into two parts. The first three steps can be run alone, so that data is loaded to the staging tables and waits there (without the import and reconciliation following immediately). In this case, the upload is marked as completed, even though the data is still in staging tables and is not yet available for display in the web interface. To remind you that inventory data visibility is pending your next import from the staging tables and subsequent license reconciliation, the Summary value for the completed Import into staging step is modified to read:
Devices read from source to staging: nnn. Inventory data will be updated 
by the next reconciliation with inventory updates (Import inventory devices task).

The last two steps are then run on the schedule set by the Inventory import and license reconcile scheduled task on your batch server, and you will need to ask your system administrator to tell you the next scheduled run time (for more information, see Server-Side Scheduled Tasks in the FlexNet Manager Suite System Reference PDF). The results of these last two steps then become visible in this System Tasks page as children of the Reconciliation task.

This choice of behaviors is controlled by a setting called PackageUploadTriggersWriters, which is a column in the ComplianceTenantSetting table of the compliance database. The default value in this column is 1, which causes all five steps to appear in your remote inventory tasks, as described in the default case above. If your database administrator changes this value to 0, the behavior changes to the split process as described. The following table summarizes the two behaviors for comparison:
Item Default behavior Modified (split) behavior
PackageUploadTriggersWriters control

1

0
Steps reported in Inventory import tasks

5

3

Data import from staging tables and license reconciliation steps are queued by:

Completed Import into staging step, so that they follow as soon as possible afterwards.

Microsoft scheduled task Inventory import and license reconcile on batch server (or in smaller implementations, the application server).

Inventory import tasks are reported as complete when:

License reconciliation using imported data is completed (step 5 of 5).

Data is in staging tables (step 3 of 3).

Successful Summary for completed Import into staging step (step 3)

 Devices read from source to staging: nnn. Devices read from source to staging: nnn. Inventory data will be updated by the next reconciliation with inventory updates (Import inventory devices task).

Impact on reconciliation

Reconciliations are queued after each import of any kind of inventory from any source, uploaded from any inventory beacon. Depending on volumes, this may adversely impact system performance.

Reconciliations are combined into a single process that can be scheduled in off-peak periods such as overnight. All data that has been loaded into staging tables since the last reconciliation is processed in this run. Processes and operator expectations should be adjusted to the normal 'delay' that this introduces to the visibility of inventory data in the web interface.
Tip: Manage your inventory collection so that each step in the process completes in less than 24 hours. Regardless of which of the above configurations you use, an overnight clean-up process marks any individual step as timed out if it has already been running for more than 24 hours. The parent system task is marked as timed out as soon as any individual child step has timed out.