I am wondering what makes an Action have the status of OPEN, after it has completed successfully on all targeted endpoints. If it was a Policy, that would keep it open, but I have some Actions that are not Policies, have completed on all targeted computers and still have a status of OPEN? Why is that? Thanks in advance.
An open action is one that has not expired or been stopped. I believe that should be the only criteria.
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Thanks. That could be the definition, but in the Console Operator’s Guide, it also says that OPEN means “it is active on one or more computers.” Except a Policy, what would make the computer keep the Action active? And what does that mean – is it constantly (or continuously) evaluating?
The language may be confusing but the definition should help your understanding
Thanks, that helps. I understand now what OPEN actually means. I was curious about one thing it said in the Console Operator’s Guide about OPEN Actions. It says, “the action is active on one or more computers…” What does “active” mean? Besides a Policy Action, which would require the computer to keep an Action open, what other situations would a completed Action be considered “active”?
The Action remains open until its expiration date (or until it is manually stopped). The Expiration Date is specifed in the “Take Action” dialog. An Action with no Expiration Date is often referred to as a Policy Action.
As long as an Action is in the Open state, it will continue to evaluate on clients, even clients that have completed the action at least once. If a client finds that the Action returns to a “Relevant” state after it has been executed, the client might Reapply the action (if that was specified in the Take Action dialog), or may change the formerly-completed Action from a “Complete” to a “Failed” status.
An example of this actually came up in my office last week, where a Group Policy object was incorrectly specifying a setting on a client. We took a BigFix Action to resolve the issue, and the clients initially marked the Action as Complete…until a Group Policy refresh an hour later reverted them back to the incorrect setting, and their Action Statuses all changed to “Failed”.
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Likewise, once an Action either Expires or is Stopped, the client will not report any further progress. For example, if a client was in a “Pending Restart” status when the Action expires or is stopped, the client will not report its progression to the “Complete” or “Failed” state, even when a reboot does later occur.
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Thank you for that clarification. So the clients will continue to evaluate. So, if the Action was a one-time thing and you didn’t want it to reapply, then you should stop the Action. Correct?
Reapplication is a setting of the action so the action being open largely doesn’t matter.
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Not for reapplication reasons, but if it was a one time thing and it has run at least once on all endpoints you targeted and you don’t need it to reapply in the future, then you should stop it for efficiency reasons.
All clients in scope will continuously evaluate all open actions for applicability. This adds to its evaluation loop.
If you created a policy and applied to 500 computers and wanted to remove 1 or more computers from this policy is there any way to do this without stopping the action?