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Tasks and services Troubleshooting

Common symptoms when the Active tasks queue is degraded or when an Audit Service is misbehaving, with the likely cause and where to verify.

Symptom: Active tasks queue persistently long

Likely cause: An Audit Service host is overloaded or has gone offline; tasks pile up in Queued waiting for capacity.

Where to verify:

  • Admin Center > Site Settings > Tasks and services > Active tasks — count of Queued rows.
  • Admin Center > Site Settings > Tasks and services > Audit services — look for services in Inactive or Outdated state, or with a stale Last active timestamp.

Resolution:

  1. If an Audit Service has gone Inactive, restart it on its host or investigate why it stopped sending heartbeats.
  2. If a single Audit Service is consistently overloaded, stagger Site schedules so big audit runs do not stack on the same minute.
  3. If load is persistent and not bursty, install a second Audit Service on the Site so the queue has more capacity to drain into.

Symptom: Dashboard widgets slow to refresh

Likely cause: Concurrent scan or audit work saturating the Audit Service host that backs the Site.

Where to verify: Admin Center > Site Settings > Tasks and services > Active tasks. A long queue is the usual correlate.

Resolution: Wait for the queue to drain; stagger schedules; add a second Audit Service host if the load is persistent. See How to monitor active tasks.

Symptom: a single task is stuck in Running for hours

Likely cause: The target is unreachable, the credentials are wrong, or a script (custom audit field or custom tool) is hung on the target.

Where to verify:

  • The task's row in Active tasks for Device / Resource — open that target separately and confirm reachability.
  • The Audit log for any partial output the task may have produced.

Resolution:

  1. Cancel the stuck task. See How to cancel a task.
  2. Re-trigger the work after fixing the underlying issue (network reachability, credential rotation, script error).

Symptom: Audit Service modal title shows - outdated

Likely cause: The Audit Service binary version lags the instance version past the threshold that flags it as outdated.

Where to verify: Admin Center > Site Settings > Tasks and services > Audit services > (service) — open the detail modal.

Resolution: Update the Audit Service binary on its Windows host. The flag is soft — outdated services keep running; this is a prompt to upgrade rather than a hard failure.

Note: The exact version-lag threshold that flips a service to Outdated may vary by deployment.

Symptom: scheduled audit did not run

Likely cause: Either the schedule is not assigned to the device, the device is offline, or the Audit Service that owns the device has gone Inactive.

Where to verify:

  • The device's Audit tab — confirm the schedule is assigned (UNASSIGNED means no schedule).
  • Admin Center > Site Settings > Tasks and services > Audit services — confirm the service is Active.
  • Admin Center > Site Settings > Settings > Audit schedules — confirm the schedule's Next execution is reasonable.

Resolution: Re-assign the schedule if missing, restart the Audit Service if inactive, or trigger an ad-hoc audit to verify the device is reachable.