Interval-Based Automatic Job Scheduling

Key Manager handles the automatic scheduling of multiple types of jobs (such as host-scan jobs) for periodically updating its information about the managed environment, and for various cleanup tasks.

Interval-based job scheduling and execution Key Manager schedules one job per interval, and will attempt to perform all scheduled jobs as soon as possible in each interval. However, note that on agent-based hosts jobs may be executed only when the agent connects to Key Manager: on hosts with very long agent- connection intervals it may take significant time before scheduled jobs are performed.

When interval settings are modified, Key Manager divides future time into intervals of specified length, counting from 00:00 of the current day. For example, if you set an interval of 10 hours, intervals will be set as follows starting from the midnight UTC of the current day: 00:00 - 10:00, 10:00 - 20:00, 20:00 - 06:00, 06:00 - 16:00, 16:00 - 02:00, and so on.

Immediately when new interval settings are applied, Key Manager launches a job update-job- intervals to update the intervals on all affected hosts. Jobs are scheduled according to the new interval once update-job-intervals completes. Key Manager then checks whether the job of the same type (either automatic or manual) has already been executed or scheduled for the current interval. If yes, Key Manager shall not schedule a job until the next interval is reached. Otherwise Key Manager schedules a job to be executed as soon as possible.

Once per minute, Key Manager polls scheduled jobs to determine their next execution time. Key Manager also launches any jobs where the next execution time has been reached, unless a previous job of the same type is still running, queued, or pending.

For information about modifying interval-based settings, see Scan Types For additional information about how jobs are executed, see Job-Execution Scheduling.