SharePoint 2013 : Health and Monitoring (part 4) - Timer Jobs, The Developer Dashboard

6. Timer Jobs

Timer jobs work at the heart of a SharePoint farm. Each SharePoint server (web-front-end or application server) hosts a SharePoint timer service, which is a Windows service. This service is responsible for running SharePoint jobs—designated units of functionality to execute a designated time and perhaps recurring.

SharePoint relies on a vast number of timer service jobs to maintain operation of the farm. The following steps demonstrate how to view the available timer job definitions in the farm:

1. Open Central Administration.
2. Click the Monitoring heading link.
3. Click the Review Job Definitions link, under the Timer Jobs heading.
4. SharePoint displays a page like that in Figure 9.

   

   Figure 9. Timer Job Definitions

   Timer job definitions are SharePoint Foundation Timer services, or associated with other SharePoint services, such as the Access or Excel services.

5. Click the View drop-down box in the top right to list timer services by web application, services, or list all jobs.
6. Click the name of any of the timer job definitions to see the details of the job.

   Administrators may change the schedule of most jobs. They may also disable and enable jobs. SharePoint allows creation of new jobs only via code and feature deployment, so seek a developer if you need a special job created. Some of the functional features of SharePoint create timer jobs to perform their tasks; for example, Content Deployment creates a new timer job to deploy content to another farm.

7. Navigate back to the Monitoring page of Central Administration.
8. Click the Check Job Status link.
9. SharePoint shows you a page of upcoming scheduled jobs, running jobs, and a history of jobs executed, with their completion status (Figure 10).

   

   Figure 10. Timer Job Statuses

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