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[INFORMATION] [TITLE] Kaseya 2 Agent Procedures & Scheduling
[AUTHOR] Ben Lavalley, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Kaseya
[SOURCE] [PRG]
[FILEPATH] [DELAY]0
[CD TRACK]0 [COMMENT]
[END INFORMATION] [SUBTITLE]
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00:00:12.00,00:00:16.70 Hello. This is Ben Lavalley, Senior Product Marketing Manager
for Kaseya.
00:00:17.00,00:00:21.70 In this video, we will be reviewing Kaseya 2 agent procedures
and scheduling.
00:00:22.00,00:00:24.70 We will be highlighting some of the enhancements we have made
00:00:25.00,00:00:26.70 over the previous version of Kaseya,
00:00:27.00,00:00:29.70 and covering agent procedures and scheduling as a whole
00:00:31.00,00:00:32.20 for anyone new to the product.
00:00:32.50,00:00:35.70 The sheer capability of agent procedures is incredible,
00:00:36.00,00:00:40.70 and I'm happy to be showcasing such an important piece of the
Kaseya framework to you.
00:00:41.00,00:00:44.70 As someone who has worked on hundreds of procedures in the past,
00:00:45.00,00:00:47.70 i'll do my best to share with you some of the magic behind them
00:00:48.00,00:00:51.20 and leave you with the understanding that you can truly build
anything you want
00:00:51.50,00:00:55.70 within our simple graphical user interface without any programming
knowledge,
00:00:56.00,00:01:01.20 allowing you to rapidly create solutions to increasingly complex IT
challenges.
00:01:01.50,00:01:07.70 Out of the nearly 500 procedures you see here, we'll highlight
a particular procedure first
00:01:08.00,00:01:09.70 Disk Defrag.
00:01:10.00,00:01:14.70 This procedure existed as four separate scripts in the previous version
of Kaseya.
00:01:15.00,00:01:16.70 Thanks to the additional nested If
00:01:17.00,00:01:18.70 capability in Kaseya 2,
00:01:19.00,00:01:23.70 these multiple scripts are now consolidated into a single and concise
00:01:24.00,00:01:28.70 agent procedure. As you can see, we have multiple If and Else
checks
00:01:29.00,00:01:31.20 in this single procedure,
00:01:31.50,00:01:34.70 a feature I know our veteran customers will be very pleased to
see.
00:01:35.00,00:01:39.20 You could select any number of script steps and drag and drop them
around the interface.
00:01:39.50,00:01:44.70 We have several dozen operations you can select for any step,
00:01:45.00,00:01:46.70 from writing files to a machine,
00:01:47.00,00:01:51.70 prompting the end user, executing shell commands, or modifying
the system registry.
00:01:52.00,00:01:57.70 Our procedures run on Windows, Mac, and our soon to be released
Linux agent.
00:01:58.00,00:02:03.70 Whether you want to use any of your own PowerShell, VB Script,
JavaScript, or Perl scripts,
00:02:04.00,00:02:05.70 any kind of third-party script language
00:02:06.00,00:02:09.70 or executable can be used within the Kaseya Agent Procedure
Editor.
00:02:10.00,00:02:14.70 A new enhancement to Kaseya 2 in general is the ability to detect
if a user
00:02:15.00,00:02:18.20 of any particular computer is idle.
00:02:18.50,00:02:22.70 This state will be reflected as an agent icon within the Kaseya
interface.
00:02:23.00,00:02:26.70 It will be blue if the user is active on the machine,
00:02:27.00,00:02:31.70 yellow if they're inactive, or green if there's no user present
at all.
00:02:32.00,00:02:35.70 During a recent demonstration of Kaseya 2 to one of our partners,
00:02:36.00,00:02:40.70 I was asked if this user status could be checked within a Kaseya
agent procedure,
00:02:41.00,00:02:44.70 determining whether or not that procedure continues
00:02:45.00,00:02:47.70 based on whether or not the user is active on their machine.
00:02:48.00,00:02:52.70 The goal of the user activity check is to avoid the possible degraded
system performance
00:02:53.00,00:02:58.70 a user might experience if a disk defrag, scan disk, disk cleanup,
00:02:59.00,00:03:04.70 or other disk intensive operation is running while they're actively
using their computer.
00:03:05.00,00:03:08.20 I checked our built-in help file, and we found that this
00:03:08.50,00:03:12.70 user status is exposed in the database, and it can easily be leveraged
00:03:13.00,00:03:15.20 in a Kaseya agent procedure.
00:03:15.50,00:03:22.70 Disk defrag check first looks to see if the user is actively
using their machine.
00:03:23.00,00:03:26.20 Once the procedure determines the system is not actively being
used,
00:03:26.50,00:03:30.20 it executes a scan to determine if the drive is fragmented enough.3\
00:03:30.50,00:03:32.70 to warrant running a defrag.
00:03:33.00,00:03:37.70 The results of this scan are written to a file, which we then
read as a variable in a second
00:03:38.00,00:03:39.70 If check.
00:03:40.00,00:03:43.70 If the output indicates the drive needs to be defragmented,
00:03:44.00,00:03:48.70 we proceed with the defrag and log down to the agent procedure
log
00:03:49.00,00:03:53.70 that the defrag successfully completed.
00:03:54.00,00:03:56.70 We're able to report on this successful defrag in the Kaseya Executive
Summary Report,
00:03:57.00,00:04:00.70 showing the past 30 days of other system maintenance procedures,
00:04:01.00,00:04:04.70 along with any other custom services you may be providing.
00:04:05.00,00:04:11.70 One new operation Kaseya 2 brings to the table is a prompt for
input when running a procedure.
00:04:12.00,00:04:16.20 The results of this prompt are then fed into the procedure as
a variable
00:04:16.50,00:04:18.70 when it is executed on your agents.
00:04:19.00,00:04:23.70 Another significant addition is the ability to write any data
from a procedure
00:04:24.00,00:04:26.50 back to the Kaseya database for reporting purposes.
00:04:26.80,00:04:30.20 One particular example of this is a ping check procedure,
00:04:30.50,00:04:32.70 which can be used to check network latency and
00:04:33.00,00:04:37.70 allow us to input the IP that latency check is run against.
00:04:38.00,00:04:41.20 I'm running this ping procedure on a number of agents,
00:04:41.50,00:04:48.70 giving them the www.kaseya.com web server host name to check for network
latency.
00:04:49.00,00:04:53.70 The results are written back to the latency custom audit field,
00:04:54.00,00:04:55.70 which I can now showcase in a report
00:04:56.00,00:04:59.70 or see in my agent status view under the latency column.
00:05:00.00,00:05:01.70 Moving on to scheduling.
00:05:02.00,00:05:05.70 Kaseya 2 introduces some new scheduling flexibility
00:05:06.00,00:05:10.70 present for agent procedures and every other module within our
framework.
00:05:11.00,00:05:13.20 I can schedule any agent procedure to run once
00:05:13.50,00:05:18.70 or run on a repeated basis, whether that is daily, weekly, or monthly.
00:05:19.00,00:05:21.70 Particular days of the week can be selected to run procedures,
00:05:22.00,00:05:26.70 giving us more granular control of exactly when we initiate tasks.
00:05:27.00,00:05:30.70 We can schedule procedures and other operations to run
00:05:31.00,00:05:34.20 on regular intervals, to completely automate maintenance procedures
00:05:34.50,00:05:36.70 that optimize system performance,
00:05:37.00,00:05:39.20 deploy Microsoft and third-party patches,
00:05:39.50,00:05:42.70 initiate backups, initiate endpoint security scans,
00:05:43.00,00:05:47.70 network scans, audits, and obviously much, much more.
00:05:48.00,00:05:51.70 Anything we perform in Kaseya can be reported upon.
00:05:52.00,00:05:56.70 So whether you may simply be enforcing system policy, like disabling
USB drives
00:05:57.00,00:05:58.70 or upgrading an Office suite,
00:05:59.00,00:06:02.20 or even remotely running an entire Windows 7
00:06:02.50,00:06:05.70 operating system upgrade, you can generate and share
00:06:06.00,00:06:09.70 tangible results of the work that Kaseya has been automating.
00:06:10.00,00:06:14.70 That wraps up our review of Kaseya agent procedures and scheduling.
00:06:15.00,00:06:17.70 We hope you can now carry with you the can do attitude necessary
00:06:18.00,00:06:24.00 to meet and exceed the expectations of the businesses you're
servicing.