Hi,

We have a nightly maintenance window that runs from 1:45am to 5:45am, where all our IT-related jobs are scheduled to run. I'm trying to set up a Time Exclusion to account for this, but I can't seem to get it to work quite right. What I did is set up a Collection called "Maintenance Window", and within that collection I have three exceptions (mainly because I couldn't find a way to simply specify a start time and an end time). My exceptions are set up like this:

1. 1:30am to 2am: Under the Hour tab, I have "choose hours" selected, and I have 1am checked off (all others are unchecked). Under the Minute tab, I have "between minutes" selected, and my minute range is 30 to 59. This should prevent jobs from running between 1:30 and 1:59am, I think.
   
2. 2am to 5am: Under the Hour tab, I have "between hours" selected, and my hour range is 2am to 5am.
   
3. 5am to 5:44am: Under the Hour tab, I have "choose hours" selected, and I have 5am checked (all others are unchecked). Under the Minutes tab, I have "between minutes" selected, and my minute range is 0 to 44.
   

To me, this should prevent any job from running between 1:30am and 5:44am (the window ends at 5:45am, so I would like jobs to run at 5:45am if their schedule dictates that that is a valid time).

This mostly works, but the problem I'm having is that it doesn't seem to recognize precisely 2am as an excluded time. I have a job scheduled to run every 5 minutes, and it knows not to run it at 1:35, 1:40, 1:45, 1:50, and 1:55 am. Strangely, it does still want to run it at 1:30am even though that time should be excluded, but I'm not too concerned about that one. It also knows not to run it at 2:05, 2:10, 2:15 ... 4:45, 4:50, 4:55, and 5am, and not to run it at 5:05, 5:10, etc up to 5:44. I can't figure out why it wants to run it at 2am. The problem with running it at that time is that it's a database task, and it's quite possible the database will be offline at that time - I'd rather not have this job fail since it's not supposed to even run then. Am I missing something? Also, is there an easier way to set this exclusion up?


Thanks.

Make sure for 2. that you have checked All minutes and all seconds.

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Hi,

Yes, I have All Minutes and All Seconds checked.




Based on the calendar, I see a number of issues. I don't know whether they're due to a bug, or due to my own misconfiguration. First, I've told it not to run on hour 1am, between minutes 30 and 59. To me, that means that it shouldn't run between 1:30am and 1:59am, so why does it want to run the job at 1:30am? Second, I have exactly the same situation with my 2am to 5am time slot. The third one is slightly different - I've told it not to run on hour 5am between minutes 0 and 44, so that should mean that it won't run between 5am and 5:44am. It looks like it realized that, but went beyond - it didn't restart the task until 6am, even though it's supposed to restart it at 5:45am.

I just thought I'd post an update on this, in case anyone else has a similar issue.

First of all, the issue I was having with the exclusions running until 6am when I was expecting them to end at 5:44 was actually due to my second rule in the exclusion. I had selected "between hours 2am and 5am", which in English means "from 2:00 am to 5:00 am". However, VC was interpretting that to mean "exclude all times where the hour is 2, 3, 4, or 5am", which effectively meant "2am to 5:59am". I changed this rule to "between 2am and 4am", which now means my exclusion timeframe is what I expect it to be - 1:30am to 5:44am.

Second, based on the job log entries, the time exclusions are working as expected - it's the calendar view that's not. The calendar says that the job will run at 1:30am (the beginning of the excluded period) and then next at 5:50am (i.e. it skips 5:45am, the first timeslot after the excluded period). However, the job logs show that the last run of the day was 1:25am (i.e. it realized that 1:30am was excluded), and the first run of the next day was 5:45am, just as expected.

Ok, great - so this has been resolved now?

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