hiteksoftware.com

[VincentMagnotta]

One of the constant requests from clients is an audit of what ran in their environment. What tasks, how long they took, what tasks they started, etc.

We've done a fair amount with this by parsing the activity log. However, there's a clear problem when there are multiple running chains/tasks since there's no indicator that a particular chain started a task (i.e. there's no parent task indication in the log) so it's not necessarily possible to resolve the hierarchy from the data that's provided.

Maybe this constitutes a feature request, but is there any way for us to figure out this out?

thanks in advance!

[Robert]

Yes, it is a needed improvement in one of the next couple of patch updates. We will see what we can do without disturbing the current logging, in case users have scripts running against the log files. Maybe an extra line with
Task Sequence Title - Step 1 - Step Title 1 etc...

It would be difficult to figure out otherwise.. unless you keep a manual variable list like:
sequence1steps = taskTitle1,taskTitle2...
sequence2steps = taskTitle5,taskTitle8 ....

then in your parser script, check which task title belongs to which sequence.. fairly complicated to do...

[VincentMagnotta]

One of the problems is that I'd have to build (AND maintain) that same messy variable for every chain in the environment and as you indicate, digging through it would be tricky.

A possibility to avoid breaking current logging is to have it be optional so that anyone reading the current logs wouldn't see anything different. It's one more item for the "Starting task Task_Name" line, which would be "who" (what parent task) is starting that task. That way we could unravel the overlapping starts since they'd effectively be a tree of linked data. Might even be as simple as having a global counter (like a top-level task id of sorts) and including that item in the Starting line.

Thanks again, Robert.

[VincentMagnotta]

This is an increasing priority for us. We can't tell our clients what we ran for them in anything like a useful manner since we can't build a hierarchy of tasks.

[Robert]

This will be logged into the activity log, in 9.04 to be released this week.

2011-05-19 10:42:37 Task Sequence - 2chains - Step = 1 : Run = 1 : Alarm : alarmtest

2011-05-19 10:44:22 Chain - chaintest - Step = 1 : Run = 1 : Echo : echoTest