Scheduling tasks and reminders

Use Scheduler to perform recurring or one-time actions on matching unsolved tickets. Scheduler processes only tickets updated within the last 30 days.

Create or open a task

Open Settings from the left navigation menu, then select Scheduler.

Settings navigation with the Scheduler tab selected

Select New task to create a scheduler task, or select an existing task’s title to edit it. HelpDesk includes a predefined task that notifies assignees about overdue tickets:

Predefined scheduler task for notifying assignees about overdue tickets

Open the predefined task to review its settings:

Scheduler task settings showing the task title, active status, and schedule

Configure the general task settings:

Title: Enter a title for the task.

Active: Activate or deactivate the task.

Scheduler task settings showing the Title field and Active toggle

After configuring the task, select Save & Close.

Configure the schedule

Set the task to run hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, once, or according to advanced CRON syntax. Configure the start time and recurrence options for the selected schedule type.

Scheduler settings for configuring when a task runs

Note

Tasks cannot run more than once per hour.

Define ticket conditions

Define which tickets the task should process. You can combine multiple conditions using AND or OR groups.

Scheduler task condition with configured ticket criteria

Condition syntax works the same way as in triggers.

Configure actions

Scheduler supports two action types: set field and send email. For every matching ticket, Scheduler runs each configured action.

Scheduler task actions that run when the condition is true

Run a task manually

To test a task or run it ahead of schedule, open its context menu and select Run task. A manual run starts immediately and uses the task’s configured ticket conditions and actions.

Review execution logs

Execution logs show the start time, finish time, duration, selected ticket IDs, selected ticket count, and failed ticket IDs. You can refresh or download the logs.

Enable Record runs to ticket history to add scheduler run information to the ticket history.

Scheduler execution logs showing task run results

Advanced CRON syntax

The CRON format is a flexible way to define complex schedules. Select the Advanced schedule type in the scheduler settings:

Scheduler settings with the Advanced schedule type and CRON expression

A CRON schedule is defined by a plain-text string consisting of six fields separated by spaces.

The first five fields’ values may be an asterisk *. That stands for the entire range of possible values, i.e. each minute, each hour, etc.

Any field may contain a list of values separated by commas (for example, 1,3,7) or a range of values separated by a hyphen (for example, 1-5).

After an asterisk * or a range of values, use a slash / to repeat values at a specified interval.

For example, you can write 0-23/2 in the Hour field to specify that the action is to be performed every two hours (it has the same effect as 0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22). The value */5 in the Minute field means that the action is to be performed every 5 minutes, 1-30/3 is equivalent to 1,4,7,10,13,16,19,22,25,28.

In the Month and Day of Week fields, you can use month or weekday names shortened to their first three letters (Jan, Feb,...,Dec or Mon, Tue,...,Sun) instead of numeric values.

Examples:

Cron string	Description
`0 * * * * ?`	Each minute
`0 59 23 31 12 ?`	One minute before the end of the year
`0 0 0 1 1 ?`	At midnight on the first day of the year
`0 45 17 7 6 ?`	Every year, on June 7th at 17:45
`0 0,15,30,45 0,6,12,18 ? * 2-6`	At 00:00, 00:15, 00:30, 00:45, 06:00, 06:15, 06:30, 06:45, 12:00, 12:15, 12:30, 12:45, 18:00, 18:15, 18:30, 18:45, Monday through Friday
`0 /15 /6 ? * 2-6`	Same as above (different notation)
`0 0 0 1 * ?`	At midnight on the first day of each month
`0 0 0 * * ?`	Daily at midnight
`0 0 0 ? * 4`	Each Wednesday at midnight