12.2 Creating Custom Tasks and Reports

Available only in the Windows console.

Secure Configuration Manager provides built-in tasks for running simple reports or actions against endpoints in your asset map, such as identifying accounts with weak passwords. You can edit these built-in tasks or create tasks to meet your organization’s specific needs. For efficiency, you can group similar tasks to get one report. Tasks provide informational data only and cannot measure the potential vulnerability of your IT assets. For more information about measuring asset vulnerability, see Section II, Auditing Your Managed Assets.

Secure Configuration Manager also enables you to customize the logo displayed on all reports. For more information about changing the logo, see Changing the Logo on the Report.

12.2.1 Creating Custom Tasks

A custom task is a report or action with pre-defined parameters. You can run the task against multiple groups of heterogeneous endpoints. Only the console user who created the task and the console administrator can see the custom task. Secure Configuration Manager includes a set of standard custom tasks that you can run immediately after you install the product.

After you have created a custom task, you can include that custom task in a task suite. You can also edit custom tasks and the built-in tasks. If the edited custom task is part of any task suite, the new custom task definition takes effect immediately in all referenced task suites. You can delete an existing custom task at any time. For more information about task suites, see Creating Groups of Custom Tasks.

WARNING:If the custom task is a member of one or more task suites, and you delete the custom task, all task suite references to this custom task are also deleted.

12.2.2 Creating Groups of Custom Tasks

Secure Configuration Manager enables you to easily create, edit, schedule, import, export, and delete task suites. A task suite is a combination of multiple reports and actions, the parameters for each report and action, the unique values input for each parameter, and a sequence of execution. You can also include custom tasks in task suites. Secure Configuration Manager includes a set of standard task suites that you can run immediately after you install the product.

After creating the appropriate task suites to meet your company’s security standards, you can schedule those task suites to allow Secure Configuration Manager to continuously assess your IT environment. Running a task suite for a managed group checks each endpoint in the group for each report or action in the task suite, and then generates a report. Once you have scheduled a task, you can update the schedule properties using the Scheduled Jobs wizard.

The console user who creates each task suite owns the task suite. By default, you are the only console user who can see a task suite that you create. To make a task suite visible to all other console users, select the Share this Task Suite check box in the Task Suite wizard. If you are a console administrator you can also reassign the owner of a scheduled task suite. For more information about roles, see Managing Roles.

NOTE:When the account for the owner of a task suite is disabled or deleted, Secure Configuration Manager no longer runs the scheduled job.

You can import one or more task suites that you have previously saved. You can also import task suites to restore a suite that was changed incorrectly. If a task suite with the same name already exists, Secure Configuration Manager gives you the option to overwrite the existing task suite. To save a specific task suite version, you can export the task suite in .xml format.

Refer to the following table when assigning permissions to console users who work with task suites.

User activity

Required permission

Run a task suite

Run Tasks and Task Suites

Import a task suite

Import Task Suites

Export a task suite

Export Task Suites

For more information about assigning permissions, see Managing Permissions.