Managing tasks

You can view and manage discovery scans and other background actions from the Tasks overview page. The Active and Completed task sections will show standard tasks, such as scans and imports, along with their current progress and summarized results. You can search or filter the tasks using different attributes.

Task status values

Tasks can have the following status values:

• New: The task has been created and is waiting to be picked up by a scanner or connector.
• Active: A scan task is in progress and the Explorer is scanning the network.
• Scanned: The network scan part of a scan task has completed.
• Connecting: A connector task is connecting to the remote system and downloading data.
• Connected: A connector task has finished downloading and the data is waiting to be processed.
• Processing, queued: Task data has been collected from a scan or a connector task, and is queued for processing.
• Processing: Task data is being processed.
• Processed: Task data has been processed and runZero data updated.
• Stopping: The task was requested to stop and is in the process of doing so.
• Stopped: The task successfully stopped.
• Canceled: An error occurred which meant that the task could not continue.
• Paused: A repeating task has been paused.

Tabs

Tabs on the Tasks overview page allow you to view a filtered subset of active, processing, scheduled, failed, completed, or recurring tasks. Each tab includes a search bar so that you can search your complete task history.

• Active shows all tasks currently scanning or connecting
• Processing shows all tasks currently processing
• Scheduled shows all non-recurring tasks that are scheduled to run
• Failed includes all tasks that were unable to finish due to an error or cancellation
• Completed lists all completed tasks in chronological order based on when the task finished processing
• Recurring shows all recurring tasks

Task details

Clicking on a task will open a card at the top of the page with details. The concentric circles show the progress of the task, with the outer circle tracking the scan or connection progress and the inner circle tracking the processing progress. The card also includes relevant timestamps and user creation data, as well as site, Explorer, and hosted zone settings. Completed tasks will also include the change summary, and recurring tasks will include a list of past runs.

Scheduled tasks

Scheduled tasks are one-off actions that will be started in the future, while recurring tasks are actions that happen on a regular basis. Recurring scan tasks generate a new standard task on each iteration of their schedule. Both scheduled and recurring scans will only launch if their associated Explorer is online and no other scan tasks are running.

The Tasks page allows Scheduled and Recurring tasks to be removed and Active tasks to be stopped. Please note that stopping an active Scan task may take a few moments, as the status of the task is not updated until the Explorer confirms that the scan was terminated.

System tasks

runZero has system tasks that you may notice while searching through your tasks. Here are some examples you might see:

• Report-based: a few reports will create tasks when initialized, including:
  • Organization overview report
  • Site and organization comparison
  • External assets report
• Outlier calculation: this generates the outlier score seen in the asset details page and will show up with the name Outlier calculation
• Query: all queries that are pinned to the Dashboard as Insights will show up with the name Query

Dismissing failed tasks

Tasks that were unable to finish due to an error or cancellation can be removed from the runZero Console by viewing the task details, clicking the “Dismiss” button and confirming the desired action. Dismissing failed tasks will archive the tasks so that they are no longer accessible.

Reprocessing tasks

You can use the Reprocess Tasks tool on the tasks overview to delete existing assets in the current organization and repopulate asset data from previous scan, import, and integration tasks using runZero’s latest algorithms. This can potentially fix duplicated or incorrectly merged assets. To reprocess tasks:

1. On the Tasks Overview page, open the hamburger menu at the top right of the table and select “Reprocess tasks”;
2. Review the warnings in the modal that opens;
3. Enter a number of days to reprocess (this defaults to 7);
4. Enter the confirmation text;
5. Click “Continue”.

The process will take some time to delete the organization’s assets and queue tasks that were created within the number of days specified for reprocessing. When it has finished queueing tasks, it will display the number of tasks to be reprocessed. You will then be able to monitor their progress in the console as normal.

Please note:

All assets in the organization will be deleted.

Any tags, risk, criticality, comments, or other manually applied changes will be removed.

During reprocessing, asset information may be incomplete and alert rules may be triggered.

If your organization has a very large number of assets, it is possible for the request to time out before completing asset deletion. In this case, you can retry the request.

The entire process may take several hours to complete.