EGD asked a question.
I am asked to support on an environment where we have Snow Inventory deployed in a VDI setup on a shared HyperVisor infra. I want to ensure we do the right things to ensure we do not impact performance too much by doing scheduled scans all at the same time and preferably outside business hours.
In the config I found the following two schedules:
---snip---
</Software>
<Meter>
<Exclude>
<Path>%windir%\*</Path>
</Exclude>
<Span>
<StarTime>PT00H00M</StarTime>
<EndTime>PT23H59M</EndTime>
</Span>
<Occurance>
<Weekday>monday</Weekday>
<Weekday>tuesday</Weekday>
<Weekday>wednesday</Weekday>
<Weekday>thursday</Weekday>
<Weekday>friday</Weekday>
<Weekday>saturday</Weekday>
<Weekday>sunday</Weekday>
</Occurance>
</Meter>
---snip---
<Schedule>
<Task>
<Occurance>
<AtLogOn>false</AtLogOn>
<AtStart>false</AtStart>
<Daily>true</Daily>
</Occurance>
<Action>scan</Action>
<TimeOfDay>PT10H00M</TimeOfDay>
<Randomize>60</Randomize>
</Task>
</Schedule>
---snip---
Can anyone explain me how to read this?
For example: PT10H00M is that Pacific Time 10 AM? We are in CET and would like to schedule anything outside of the 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM (07:00-19:00) time window.
Thanks in advance.
I don't think the PT stands for Pacific time.
I have the same settings as per snows agent creation defaults and the time runs as per the local machines time at 10am randomized by 60 minutes.
When changing scan times take in to account the time your DUJ runs as if you say scan machines out of hours at 10pm and your DUJ runs at 9pm you'll not see the newly scanned data for another day.
Thank you this helps and confirms what I was thinking. Still wondering what PT stands for if not Pacific time.
The agent configuration guide here is quite useful if you haven't already reviewed it. Also a lot of these settings are Windows agent only, scheduling for other agents isn't configured this way. Reviewing the ideas board, I can see something here indicating that an enhancement was on the way to configure the scan window but I'm not sure how to do this based on the available Task elements defined.
I'm happy that somebody has asked this, I've wondered about this before. It almost looks like it was supposed to be a duration as specified by ISO 8601 where I think PT10H00M would mean 10 hours. It does seem like a strange choice of format to me.
On the format I do fully agree, I always try to understand "why". So for now I will use what "sounds" best to me and use is as LT (Local Time)
PT - What does PT stand for? The Free Dictionary ProTempore (Latin: at the moment) sounds also nice.😀
Hi Colin, thanks, link was not working with I thing I found the one you meant: https://docs.snowsoftware.com/documentation-resources/snow-inventory/configuration-doc.html#Configuration_Schedule
Still no answer on the PT part but I will assume it is local time.
ElementDescription
StartTime
Required element.
Example: PT09H10 All components (PThhHmmM) are required!
EndTime
Required element.
Example: PT09H10 All components (PThhHmmM) are required!
Ah sorry, not sure how I mangled the URL, yes that was the document I meant.
Note those StartTime/EndTime elements you note relate to the Span Element of the metering configuration (you probably already know this). Would have expected something similar to allow configuration of the scan window that you are trying to achieve.
I think @David Hobbs is correct in the ISO 8601 answer. Probably stands for Period of Time
First of all I'd like to mention that the Snow Inventory Agent does not impact the Performance at all.
I've had many customers that said "oh we will investigate on any performance impact" and later they came back to me saying "you don't even notice it".
Then you have that randomize part of 60 (or maybe 90) minutes by def ault, meaning that from within that randomize period the start time the Agent will scan and send.
Overall, in my humble opinion, there are other thing more important to deal with than this topic 😊
My guess on PT would be something like "PC time" but this might be a Snow internal naming convention.