Maintenance Tab

The Maintenance tab provides the tools required to ensure the health of the databases. Each of the tasks available using this tool can be scheduled to run at a date and time chosen by the administrator and may be scheduled to repeat as often as necessary.

The Database Maintenance tool uses Microsoft’s Task Scheduler to schedule and launch tasks. Although the Database Maintenance tasks can be viewed through the Task Scheduler, Quest highly recommends that all Database Maintenance tasks be scheduled or cancelled only through the Database Maintenance tool. Using Microsoft’s Task Scheduler to alter these tasks is not recommended.

The upper pane of the maintenance tab displays all of the currently defined maintenance tasks and their characteristics. Administrators can use this screen to quickly review scheduled tasks, their status, any errors encountered during the processing of the tasks, and other important information at a glance. This pane reloads the presented information every 60 seconds. The refresh rate can be changed or disabled using the toolbar.

Right-clicking on a task listed in this pane will provide several options, each of which is also available using the toolbar:

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•	Properties

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Refresh

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Options

Selecting Options from the right-click menu or from the toolbar launches the Maintenance Task Options dialog box. This dialog box provides control over the retention of the Maintenance Task history. By default, Quest Reporter maintains a history of the last 20 maintenance tasks performed and deletes both the associated task log files and task trace files when deleting a task. The dialog box allows the user to change these default settings.

When a task is deleted, its associated task history and log files may also be deleted. By default, both the task log file and the task trace file are deleted along with the task itself. This behavior can be changed by clicking the Options button and selecting which log files are affected by task deletion.

For more information regarding task log files, see Creating New Tasks.

The lower pane of this tab displays the results of recently performed maintenance tasks.

The maintenance tools are divided into two categories: Maintenance tasks and Data Aging tasks.

Maintenance tasks include rebuilding table indexes, truncating transaction logs and shrinking data and log files to free space in the database. For more information regarding these tasks, see Maintenance Tasks.

Data Aging tasks allow the administrator to schedule data removal from the database as it reaches a specific age. Data can be selected for removal using filters based on the age of the data or an attribute. For more information regarding these tasks, see Data Aging Tasks.

Note: In order to access Maintenance History traces from other computers, the log folder must be accessible from the remote computer through either a shared path (\\computer\share\ReporterLogs) or through an Admin share (\\computer\c$\ReporterLogs). The logs are located in the same place as Reporter logs and can be configured through the Configuration Utility.