Walkthrough: Defining a time period to block all job execution

In a production environment, you might have certain periods of time during the day, week, or month when the workload on your servers is high and you do not want to risk over-utilizing resources by running TrueSight Server Automation jobs. TrueSight Server Automation enables you to define time intervals called exclusion windows, when no TrueSight Server Automation jobs can execute on servers that you specify.

Before you begin

To define exclusion windows, your role must have authorizations from the ExclusionWindow family of authorizations. At minimum, the role must be assigned ExclusionWindow.Read, ExclusionWindow.Create, and ExclusionWindow.CreateACL. To assign target servers or server groups with exclusion windows, your role must also have the Server.read and ServerGroup.read authorizations. For a full list of authorizations, see System-authorizations. For information about granting authorizations to roles, see Creating-roles.

Step 1: (optional) Grouping servers in server groups or server smart groups

To simplify the task of assigning exclusion windows to a large number of servers, you can prepare server groups or server smart groups based on criteria that are relevant to your business needs.

Refer to the following pages for information about creating server groups or server smart groups:

• Server smart groups: For a step-by-step example on creating a dynamic group of servers, see Walkthrough-Dynamically-organizing-assets-with-smart-groups.
• Server groups: For information about creating a static group of servers, see Assigning-servers-to-server-groups.

Step 2: Defining the exclusion window and assigning it to servers

Deactivating and activating an exclusion window

You can temporarily deactivate and subsequently re-activate any defined exclusion window.

Grouping all servers associated with a specific exclusion window

You can use a server property to create a smart group that groups together all servers associated with a specific exclusion window. Such a smart group will later be useful when you need to select servers, especially when selecting targets for a job.

Exporting details of time windows

To help you keep track of all the defined time windows (both exclusion windows and maintenance windows) and to figure out which servers are associated with which window, you can export the basic definitions and properties of defined maintenance windows and exclusion windows to a CSV file.