PingDirectory

About recurring tasks and task chains

You can use the admin console to create recurring tasks and task chains to perform regular maintenance tasks for the PingDirectory server. These tasks can perform regular backups, LDIF exports, enter and exit lockdown mode, or other static operations.

Because this process is owned by the server, tasks do not require special privileges or credentials, and they can be run when the server is offline.

Create recurring tasks and add them to a recurring task chain for scheduling. The task chain ensures that invocations of a task or set of tasks run in a specified order and do not overlap.

A recurring task includes:

  • The task-specific object classes to include in the task entry

  • The task-specific attributes to include in the task entry, if any

  • Whether to alert on task start, success, or failure

  • Any addresses to email on task start, success, or failure

  • Whether to cancel an instance of the task if it is dependent upon another task and that task does not complete successfully

After you create a task, add one or more tasks to a task chain and schedule the chain.

A recurring task chain includes:

  • An ordered list of the tasks to invoke

  • The months, days, times, and time zones in which each task can be scheduled to start

  • The behavior to exhibit if any of the tasks are interrupted by a server shutdown

  • The behavior to exhibit if the server is offline when the start time occurs

Changing the schedule for an existing recurring task chain only takes effect the next time an instance of the chain needs to be scheduled. It does not affect any existing instances of the chain that are already scheduled. Existing scheduled instances still run at the originally scheduled time. When that run is complete, the server schedules the next iteration according to the then-current schedule logic.

You cannot cancel the existing scheduled instance to make the next instance run earlier. When you cancel an instance of a recurring task chain, the server automatically schedules the next instance for the next time that matches the scheduling criteria. It never schedules a new instance for earlier than or the same time as one that you manually canceled.