(imported topic written by YorkLy)
Hi Folks, I am still trying to find out why my completed actions are stayed in “open” status until it expired? Should it be changed imediately when an action is completed 100% as I don’t see any good reason to see “open” status when it is completed.
Thanks.
York
(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)
Hi York,
Marking many “Open” actions as “Complete” could be misleading, because the action has the potential to run on additional endpoints. 100% Complete refers to the progress of the action on targeted endpoints that have reported relevant for the action. However, if later additional targeted endpoints determine that the open action is relevant, they will run the action. So the term “open” is intended to indicate that targeted endpoints will still run the action if they determine it is relevant.
Say you target a patch at all Windows XP machines in your deployment. If you have 20 XP endpoints reporting in at the time and they apply the action, you’ll see 100% complete. But since the action is still “Open”, when you add 100 more XP endpoints later (say they get powered on later because they’re in a different time zone), they will also apply the action.
(imported comment written by YorkLy)
Hi Abauer, what you are saying that if I take an action to perform a patch on 20 Windows XP (by selecting 20 Windows XP manually) and the action is shown completed 100%. Assuming 100% completed means that the action to install the patch has been done on these 20 Windows XP workstation. Then why would I need to keep this action as open status? Why would I care about other Windows XP machines which I did not want this patch to be installed to take this action automatically without having me to take action against them?
I thought each action I have taken, it should treat as individual action or task only for the selected targets. When would my action show “Completed or Successful”?
York
(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)
As you suggests, an action targeted at specific computers would not have the behavior I described above. However, even these types of actions can run again after % Complete shows 100% if you have it set to reapply if it becomes relevant again. Because of subtleties like this and the ability to target actions by properties (and thus not know if all computers that will run the action have reported in) we have two concepts:
Status: whether the action is Open (will run on relevant targeted computers) or Expired (is after the End Date, and will no longer run)
% Complete: the percentage of known targeted machines on which the action has run successfully.
It sounds like the second is the concept closest to what you are looking for, although I understand it’s not exactly what you want. It is available as a column in action lists in the console, and should have been one of the default columns. If you don’t see it, right click on the header in an action list and select % complete.
(imported comment written by YorkLy)
The % complete item is already selected on my Action view. For example, if the following action has 2 targets in 100% Completed status, but my action is still show “Open” state. To my mind or anyone, it is really confusing to why my action is still showing “Open” state as it should be at least showed “Successful” or something makes more sense.
Status Count Percentage
Completed 2 100.00%
If these two targets would become relevance for this specific action again in the near future, the action or fixlet will appear again for these two targets on the Fixlet and Tasks view.
It is just adding more confusion to a user or operator when there might hundreds or thousands of actions showing up as “open” state where the actual action is already completed 100% on all targets.
York
(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)
If this is causing confusion in your deployment, I’d recommend hiding the “State” column in your consoles, as it sounds like you already have the information you want in the “% Complete” column. While there are inconsistencies we could resolve (such as using both “State” and “Status”), this property has long indicated whether the action is still capable of running or has expired.