Policies for EAV Scheduler: Cannot use local time

[fxcd 2]

Hello,

Our company has 6 sites in 4 different time zones. I am trying to configure Endpoint Antivirus (EAV) on all our endpoints in our company to run a weekly scan job every Monday at lunch time.

My first attempt was to configure a Client Task in our ESET Remote Administrator (ERA) appliance. In Client Tasks,  I can "USE LOCAL TIME" of the target instead of console timezone. That is, the task is run at the local time of the endpoint. However, we noticed the task is not triggered on endpoints that are not permanently connected to our ERA appliance (i.e. laptops on the go).

Therefore, I created a policy in ERA to configure EAV's scheduler to run the scan at the appropriate time. Unfortunately, there is no option to let the job run at the endpoint's local time. The scheduled time transmitted to the endpoint appears to be calculated from the timezone of the ERA appliance. For example, with our ERA appliance located in Europe, a task scheduled to run at 11:30 AM in an ERA policy will run at 5:30 AM in Ontario, Canada (or won't run, as the endpoint will likely not be on, that early in the morning).

So I went ahead and created four policies for four different time zones to run a scan job every Monday during (local) lunch time. I therefore calculated the time difference between ERA's timezone and the individual sites. It would be acceptable to do the work once, if it wasn't for... Daylight Saving Time (DST). DST requires us to adjust our policy twice a year for two of our sites or otherwise, the job will be run an hour late or early, depending on the time change.

Maybe I am overseeing an essential configuration item, but if not, it would be great to be able to set the scheduled job to run at the endpoint's local time, as this would reduce the number of policies and amount of interaction needed to centrally manage endpoints in different time zones.

If someone has another useful tip in the matter, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks

[Marcos 5,074]

Currently this is not possible because the time is converted to Unix time when saving a task. We'll track it as an improvement for future versions.

[MartinK 378]

3 hours ago, fxcd said:

My first attempt was to configure a Client Task in our ESET Remote Administrator (ERA) appliance. In Client Tasks,  I can "USE LOCAL TIME" of the target instead of console timezone. That is, the task is run at the local time of the endpoint. However, we noticed the task is not triggered on endpoints that are not permanently connected to our ERA appliance (i.e. laptops on the go).

Could you be more specific of client task & trigger configuration? Screenshot of trigger section of client task configuration may help us to diagnose this issue because there are multiple ways how to configure tasks to be executed repeatedly. Once it is done and task is delivered to AGENT, it should be executed even without connection to ERA. Any chance you used ASAP trigger type instead of regular-based trigger when assigning client task to devices?

How did you checked that task is not executed?

Example of trigger configuration that should repeatedly (every monday on 12:00 of local time, or just after AGENT startup in case time was missed) execute selected task on client:

where details of CRON expression configuratiom may be found in documentation.

 

[fxcd 2]

Hi,

I recreated the Trigger for the Client Task with Trigger Type: CRON Expression and it appears this solved the problem!

I then retried it with our originally used Trigger Type "Scheduler - Weekly", and it worked as well. My guess is there was an issue in ERA/Agent/EAV 6.3, which was the version we used at the time the Client Task Trigger was originally created.

However it may be, it works now with Client Tasks, even when the endpoints are not connected to the ERA server.

It still would be nice to be able to use Local Time in Policies for EAV Scheduler in the future, but this feature is not that urgent for us anymore, as we now have a working solution.

Thanks!

[MichalJ 434]

@fxcd Just to let you know, the option to configure "local time" for the EAV Scheduler, is in the backlog (as it might be relevant for customers, having unmanaged environments). For managed environments, the preferred way is to use the client tasks in ERA, in order to better monitor executions of such tasks and have them in reporting framework.