Practical Alternative for Windows Scheduled Tasks (small shop)

Question

I work in a very small shop (2 people), and since I started a few months back we have been relying on Windows Scheduled tasks. Finally, I've decided I've had enough grief with some of its inabilities such as

1. No logs that I can find except on a domain level (inaccessible to machine admins who aren't domain admins)
2. No alerting mechanism (e-mail, for one) when the job fails.

Once again, we are a small shop. I'm looking to do the analogous scheduling system upgrade than I'm doing with source control (VSS --> Subversion). I'm looking for suggestions of systems that

1. Are able to do the two things outlined above
2. Have been community-tested. I'd love to be a guinae pig for exciting software, but job scheduling is not my day job.
3. Ability to remotely manage jobs a plus
4. Free a plus. Cheap is okay, but I have very little interest in going through a full blown sales pitch with 7 power point presentations.
5. Built-in ability to run common tasks besides .EXE's a (minor) plus (run an assembly by name, run an Excel macro by name a plus, run a database stored procedure, etc.).

Fungi

Answer 1

I think you can look at :

http://www.visualcron.com/

Beating

this looks very promising. i'll take a look. – Fungi

Super easy install, a little tinkering (~20 minutes) to setup a couple of specialized jobs, great UI for managing jobs. I know windows scheduled tasks is a low bar to surpass, but this is head and sholders better than most sub 1,000 dollar products. – Fungi

I've been very satisfied with this product. It is totally worth it. – Fungi

Answer 2

Consider Cygwin and its version of "cron". It meets requirements #1 thru 4 (though without a nice UI for #3.)

Hereabouts

Answer 3

If you're looking for a free tool there is plenty of implementations for the popular Cron tool for Windows, for example CRONw. It's pretty easy to configure and maintain. You could easily write add custom WSH scripts to send your emails and add log entries.

If you're going commercial way BMC Control-M is arguably one of the best but I don't believe that it is particularly cheap.

You may also consider some upcoming packages like JobScheduler

Poulterer

Answer 4

Apologize for kicking up the dust here on a very old thread. But I couldn't disagree more with what's been presented here.

Scheduled tasks in Windows are AWESOME (a %^#% load better than writing services I might add). Yes, not without limitations. But still extremely powerful. I rely on them in earnest for a variety of different things.

If you even have a slight grasp on c# you can write as custom "task" (essentially a console application) to do, well, virtually anything. If persistent/accessible logging is what you're after, why not something like Serilog or NLog? Even at the time of writing, it had a very robust feature set. This tool in and of itself, in conjunction with some c#, could've solved both your problems very easily.

Perhaps I'm missing the point, but it seems to me that this isn't really a problem. At least not anymore...

Helldiver

Answer 5

Pretty old question, but we use Jenkins. Yes its main purpose is for CI\CD, but its also a really nice UI for CRON with a ton of plugins and integrations.

Gaygaya