Constant monitoring of task queue in Task Manager is required to make sure that provisioning on your platform works fine.

To open OA task queue go to Top > Operations > Tasks in OA Provider Control Panel.

Task Manager is very useful tool for tracking almost everything in your Operations Automation system. All actions such as creating/updating/removing customers' services are performed through tasks of two main types:

  • Periodic tasks (re-scheduled)
  • Background tasks (running once on demand) - OA has many built-in periodic tasks like

    • Monitor mail disk space usage collectors
    • Clean up login history
    • Update disk usage statistics
    • Get traffic usage info
    • Initiate VPS traffic usage reports

    Each of them is run on a regular schedule that is defined by the task Period setting and may generate a number of background tasks to perform necessary actions. E.g., the task Monitor VPS Migration state looks for Virtuozzo containers queued for migration and schedules a separate task to execute migration scripts for each found container.

You can edit the periodic tasks schedule and view task processing history through the task log in OA Provider Control Panel:

  • Top > Operations > Tasks > Background > Task Log
  • Top > Operations > Tasks > Periodic > Task Log

Not all scheduled tasks, however, are triggered by periodic ones. Many of them are triggered by system events or user actions in Control Panel. You can easily identify what a task is by looking at the Name and Queue name parameters. These will give you a clue about the task’s object (domain, website, mailbox, application, VPS etc.) and its ID.

You can sort and filter tasks by part of the name included in asterisks (e.g. *disable vps*, *sharepoint*, *remove user*) or the queue name (e.g. *domain*, *crmorg*, *exchangeservice*). This way you can understand how many tasks failed recently and which service caused the most failures. You can also select a single task to see its status, execution time, execution log (if any), and output.

Available task statuses are:

  • Unprocessed - the task is waiting to be executed (marked white).
  • Rescheduled - the task failed during its execution and is in the queue again (marked yellow). Periodic tasks always have the rescheduled status.
  • Running - the task is executing at the moment (marked green).
  • Cancelled - the task was manually recalled from execution (marked black with white cross).
  • Restarted - the task was interrupted (marked yellow).
  • Failed - it is impossible to execute the task due to some reason, e.g. lack of a necessary component (marked red with the white exclamation sign). Normally, all tasks should stay Unprocessed, Rescheduled or Running. Scheduled tasks queue should be kept as short as possible. Failed tasks can be re-run manually by OA operator.

    Failed tasks usually have reason of failure in task properties in the parameter Last execution output.

    Analyze failed tasks on daily basis, fix the problem which prevent tasks from successful executing pointed in the parameter Last execution output and re-run task after that.

Note: Using task cancellation functionality can lead to irreversible consequences. Use task cancellation very carefully. If you are not sure about the cancellation result it is not recommended to cancel the task.

For more details about task management please refer to the OA Providers' Guide: Managing Background Tasks.

Additional information

See the global article OA Maintenance Guide for checking other important settings.

Internal content