User-Defined Inventory Discovery Job

User-Defined Inventory Discovery Job

The Switch Inventory job is a system job that runs everyday to collect physical and logical inventory information of devices on the network. By default, this job runs for all devices on the network. You cannot customize this job to collect inventory only for a select set of devices or a device group. Also, you cannot abort any long running instances of this job with ease.

You can create user-defined Inventory Discovery jobs where you can:

  • Collect inventory only for select set of devices or a device group.

  • Customize the recurrence.

  • Choose the number of times the job should run.

  • Abort the job automatically when it’s running for a longer time than expected.

  • Choose to prioritize inventory collection on devices skipped from a previously aborted job run.

You can either run the default switch Inventory job or the user-defined Inventory Discovery job. You must disable the default switch inventory job before running any user-defined Inventory Discovery jobs. To do this:

  1. Navigate to Administration > Settings > System Settings > Inventory.

  2. Under Inventory, select the check box Disable Switch Inventory Job and click Save. Once you enable this setting, the default Switch Inventory job is disabled and the user-defined Inventory Discovery job is enabled.

To switch back to the default Switch Inventory job, clear the Disable Switch Inventory Job check box. This disables and suspends any scheduled user-defined Inventory Discovery jobs.


Note
When you switch between the Inventory Discovery job and the Switch Inventory job (from Inventory Discovery job to Switch Inventory job for example) the job that you switch to is only enabled but does not run automatically. You will need to manually resume the job run by selecting the job from the Jobs Dashboard (Administration > Dashboards > Jobs dashboard) and clicking Resume series.

Create a User-Defined Inventory Discovery Job

To create a user-defined switch inventory job:

Before you begin

Disable the default Switch Inventory job. Navigate to Administration > Settings > System Settings > Inventory. Under Inventory, select the check box Disable Switch Inventory Job and click Save.

Note
You can still create user-defined Inventory Discovery jobs even if you haven't disabled the default Switch Inventory job. These newly-created jobs remain suspended; you will be able to run these jobs after you disable the default Switch Inventory job.

Procedure

Step 1

Navigate to Administration > Dashboards > Jobs Dashboard > User Jobs and click ‘+’.

Step 2

Specify a Job name. Alphabets, numbers, underscore, hyphen, and space are allowed. Special characters are not permitted.
Step 3

Click the Select toggle button to choose either by By Device or By Group.

  • By Device - lists all the devices in the system. There is no limit on the number of devices you can choose.

  • By Group - lists all system and user-defined groups. You can choose only one device group at a time.

Choose devices or a device group as necessary and click Next.

Step 4

Schedule the job by configuring the following settings:

Schedule Settings

  • Start time: Specify the start date and time.

  • Recurrence: Choose either Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Yearly. The minimum recurrence time you can schedule is every 6 hours. This is also the default recurrence time.

  • End time: Choose one of the options to specify an end time for the job.

    • No End Date/Time - if you do not wish to specify an end time and would like to run the job indefinitely.

    • After - to end the job after running the specified number of times. This option is available only if you choose Recurrence as Hourly or Daily.

    • End at - to end the job on a specific date and time.

    Abort Settings

    • Abort Long running Job - Select this check box and specify the cut-off time in hours and minutes. Any job running beyond the time you specify here will be aborted automatically. The minimum time you can specify is 2 hours.

    • Collect Abort Devices First in Next Run - Select this check box to prioritize sync on aborted devices in the next run.

Step 5

Click Finish.

You can view the newly created job on the Jobs dashboard (Administration > Dashboards > Jobs dashboard > User jobs > Inventory Discovery Jobs). Select the job and click Run if you would like to run the job immediately. See Manage Jobs Using the Jobs Dashboard for more information.

Edit a User-Defined Inventory Discovery Job

Procedure

Step 1

Select the Inventory Discovery job from the Jobs dashboard.
Step 2

Click Edit Schedule to modify the schedule settings.

Note 

You can only edit the schedule or abort settings. You cannot modify the devices or device group you chose when you created the job.

View Results on Jobs Dashboard

You can view the result of the job run on the Job dashboard.

Procedure

Step 1

Navigate to Administration > Dashboards > Jobs dashboard > User jobs > Inventory Discovery Jobs.

Step 2

Click the hyperlink of the job.

The Job Results page for the job displays the following details:

  • Collection summary of individual devices - Device Name, IP address, Start Time, End Time, Result

  • Device-specific results to indicate:

    • Success - when inventory collection status on the device is Completed.

    • Failed - when inventory collection status on the device is Completed with Warning, Collection Failure or credential failure.

    • Cancelled - if the job was aborted.


    Note
    Devices that are not in Managed-Complete state will be skipped during the job execution. If any of the participating devices are already in sync, then those devices are skipped during the inventory discovery job execution and marked as Cancelled.

  • Overall Job collection status as:

    • Success - if inventory collection was successful on all devices.

    • Failure - if inventory collection failed on all devices

    • Partial Success - if inventory collection failed on some of the devices.

    • Cancelled - if the job was aborted.