In many environments, you might need to perform unscheduled maintenance on a computer. For example, an organization might have an Apache Web server that must be shut down immediately. In this case, you can temporarily block all jobs, events, and data for a particular computer, including jobs that remotely monitor a computer, by placing the computer in machine maintenance mode.
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Maintenance option |
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Machine maintenance |
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Scheduled maintenance |
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If you intend to shut down a computer that is managed by AppManager, it is always a good idea to enable machine maintenance before you shut the computer down. In some cases, as the computer is shutting down, a monitoring job might error out because the resource that the job monitors is not available.
You must manually enable and disable machine maintenance on the computer. The only exception is when you enable maintenance on a computer and replace it with a clone. Because the clone does not have any information about its machine maintenance status, when the computer is brought online and communicates with the management server, after about 5 minutes, the management server will automatically disable machine maintenance on the computer. Alternatively, you can manually remove the machine maintenance from the clone computer.
To enable machine maintenance on a computer, in a Servers view, select a computer and then in the Tasks pane click Maintenance Mode Tasks > Enter Maintenance Mode. The status of the Maintenance column changes to indicate the computer is In Maintenance.
To disable machine maintenance and resume all monitoring jobs, in the view pane select the server you want, and then in the Tasks pane click Maintenance Mode Tasks - Exit Maintenance Mode.
If a managed computer is in maintenance mode, a deployment task configured to run on the computer will run at its scheduled time. Enabling maintenance mode on a managed computer does not prevent the deployment task from running. However, updated discovery information for installation packages will not appear in the Control Center console until after you disable maintenance mode.
You cannot use ad hoc maintenance to turn off scheduled maintenance. Therefore, it is good practice to avoid using both at the same time.
Knowledge Scripts that remotely monitor a server, such as the NT_RemoteServiceDown Knowledge Script, continue to monitor a remote server that is in maintenance mode. However, if an event condition is detected while a remote server is in maintenance mode, it is not displayed in the Operator Console or Control Center console. Also, if the remote Knowledge Script is configured to run a responsive action on the management server, the action is suppressed.
Do not configure a Knowledge Script to run a responsive action on the remote computer. If an event condition is detected, no event will appear in the Operator Console or Control Center console, but the action will run.
In certain situations, it’s a good idea to control job scheduling by setting a resource dependency. For example, if regularly scheduled maintenance periods aren’t reliable or are hard to anticipate, you may want to specify that jobs only run when required file-system related resources or specific services are available. Setting a resource dependency is especially useful when running Knowledge Scripts on MSCS (clustered) resource objects to avoid duplicated events and data.
You can use the AMAdmin_SetResDependency Knowledge Script to specify resources and services that must be active and available for the jobs to run. If any resource or service is not available, the jobs are suspended until the specified resource or service becomes available.
For example, if you’re monitoring Exchange Server, you may want to check that the MSExchangeDS, MSExchangeIS, and MSExchangeSA services are running before running Exchange jobs. Even if you have established a maintenance period and the maintenance period has expired, if these services are not running, the Exchange jobs are prevented from restarting if those services are offline. For more information, see the online Help for the AMAdmin_SchedMaint or AMAdmin_SetResDependency Knowledge Scripts.