Managing tasks
The Tasks overview page is where you view and manage discovery scans and other background actions. The Active and Completed task sections show standard tasks, such as scans and imports, with their current progress and summarized results. You can search or filter tasks by different attributes.
Task status values
Tasks can have the following status values:
- New: The task is created and waiting for a scanner or connector to pick it up.
- 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: runZero has collected the data from a scan or connector task and queued it for processing.
- Processing: Task data is being processed.
- Processed: runZero has processed the task data and updated its records.
- Stopping: The task was asked to stop and has not yet stopped.
- Stopped: The task stopped successfully.
- Canceled: An error occurred and the task could not continue.
- Paused: A repeating task is paused.
Tabs
The tabs on the Tasks overview page filter the task list, and each tab has a search bar, so 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 could not finish because of an error or cancellation
- Completed lists all completed tasks in chronological order by when they finished processing
- Recurring shows all recurring tasks
Task details
Click a task to open a details card at the top of the page. The concentric circles show the task’s progress: the outer circle tracks the scan or connection and the inner circle tracks processing. The card also includes relevant timestamps and user creation data, plus the site, Explorer, and hosted zone settings. Completed tasks add a change summary, and recurring tasks add a list of past runs.
Scheduled tasks
Scheduled tasks are one-off actions that start at a future time, and recurring tasks repeat on a schedule. Recurring scan tasks generate a new standard task on each iteration of their schedule. Both scheduled and recurring scans launch only if their Explorer is online and no other scan tasks are running.
From the Tasks page you can remove Scheduled and Recurring tasks and stop Active tasks. Stopping an active Scan task may take a few moments, because the status does not update until the Explorer confirms that the scan was terminated.
System tasks
runZero also runs system tasks that you may notice while searching your tasks. Some examples:
- Report-based: a few reports create tasks when they start, including:
- Organization overview report
- Site and organization comparison
- External assets report
- Outlier calculation: generates the outlier score shown on the asset details page and appears with the name
Outlier calculation - Query: every query pinned to the Dashboard as an Insight appears with the name Query
Dismissing failed tasks
A failed task is one that could not finish because of an error or cancellation. To remove it from the runZero Console, open the task details, click the “Dismiss” button, and confirm. Dismissing a failed task archives it, so it is no longer accessible.
Reprocessing tasks
The Reprocess Tasks tool on the tasks overview deletes the existing assets in the current organization and repopulates asset data from previous scan, import, and integration tasks using runZero’s latest algorithms. This can fix duplicated or incorrectly merged assets. To reprocess tasks:
- On the Tasks Overview page, open the hamburger menu at the top right of the table and select “Reprocess tasks”.
- Review the warnings in the modal that opens.
- Enter the number of days to reprocess (the default is 7).
- Enter the confirmation text.
- Click “Continue”.
Deleting the organization’s assets and queueing the tasks created within the specified number of days takes some time. When queueing finishes, runZero displays the number of tasks to be reprocessed, and you can monitor their progress in the console as normal.
Reprocessing deletes all assets in the organization, and with them any tags, risk, criticality, comments, or other manually applied changes. During reprocessing, asset information may be incomplete and alert rules may be triggered. If your organization has a very large number of assets, the request may time out before asset deletion completes; if it does, you can retry the request. The entire process may take several hours.