Background: If a device is online for the detection phase of a maintenance schedule, it is considered online and will proceed with the execution at the scheduled execution time or when it next checks in, regardless of when that may be.
Per Immy Support:
The preference to skip if a computer is offline is only checked at the start of a session in the detection phase. After that the offline behavior is not checked again, for the execution phase.
The request: An option to skip executing the maintenance session if the device misses the execution start time and/or if the execution is during business hours.
This has caused us some grief. We supress reboots during business hours and some Forticlient updates require a reboot inorder to complete the install process. So, when a large number of machines didn’t start their execution phase until business hours the next day due to a server issue, there were quite a few devices that no longer had a functional VPN client.
After working with support, it was suggested that we run execution immediately after detection and schedule the detection/execution for the start of the maintenance / reboot window. This would be fine, but we have international users across many different time zones. And when detection and execution are linked, the ability to use the devices timezone goes away.
Not really sure how to handle this gracefully, but an ‘online’ check with the execution phase might be a start. I could see a couple options.
Skip execution if the device missed the execution time by XX hours.
Skip execution all together if currently in business hours.
(wait for the reboot prompt notification to mature a bit and become more reliable and customizable then just prompt users to reboot as necessary)