In our environment we have three types of reboot classifications.
Servers that can be rebooted on weekends only during the 1AM & 2AM time slot
Servers that can be rebooted on weekends only during the 2AM & 5AM time slot
Workstations that can be rebooted any day of the week between 1AM & 5AM
We set a custom property for each machine. The relevance in BigFix looks like this:
if (exists value “PatchRebootClassification” of key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Company_Name\PatchManagement” of native registry) then (value “PatchRebootClassification” of key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Company_Name\PatchManagement” of native registry as string) else “Value Not Set”
We use the Restart Needed task setup to run against each machine type and the actions are set to never expire.
The servers in the 1AM to 2AM slot need to be spot checked or sniff tested by our overnight operators after a reboot. So, I’d like to email a Web Report for all servers that have rebooted in the past two hours for machines in PatchRebootClassification1. I think I need to use something like this:
(uptime of operating system < 2 * hour)
But what am I reporting against, the action or the computers themselves? Is there a report out there already? Because I kinda suck at the relevance language thing.
Here is one possible approach to ansering your question:
You can calculate the time of the last reboot by using the Relevance expression:
(boot time of operating system)
Create a Retrieved Property, lets call it “OS Last Start”, with this definition. Then you can craft a custom Web Report (a bit of a learning curve!) with core Relevance something like this:
(name of item 0 of it,((now - (value of results (item 0 of it, item 1 of it) as time))/hour)) of (it, bes property “OS Last Start”) of bes computers
This will give you a list of computer names and the time interval in hours since the last reboot:
ComputerA, 2
ComputerB, 6
ComputerC, 1
You can create filters to get just the subset you want, and then schedule the Web Report to be emailed out at a scheduled time.
That said, you should be aware that when a computer reboots, the BES Client reconnects to the BES Server and works its way though a laundry list of activities, including updating various Retrieved Properties. Depending on a variety of factors, including but not limited to the size of your BES deployment, your BES infrastructure, the number of BES sites a particular computer is subscribed to, the number of open actions, and the number of properties you 've defined, there will be elapsed time between the time a computer reboots and the time it updates the property you’ve created to capture the time of the last reboot.