Richard Hicks' Forefront TMG Blog

There are many third-party reporting tools available today that can aggregate log data for analysis, reporting, and event correlation. One of my favorites for Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 is WebSpy Vantage. Vantage uses its own data stores (called storage), so before you can view logged data or generate reports, you must first import data from your current TMG logging repository (SQL or text file) in to Vantage storage. Once this data has been imported you can do pretty much whatever you want with it after that.

When you create a task to automate the import of log data, you will notice that the Recurrence options are limited to None, Daily, Weekly, and Monthly.

What if you’d like to import the data more frequently than daily? You could create another daily task and schedule that to run daily at a different time, but fortunately there’s an easier way. Since WebSpy Vantage leverages the Windows Task Scheduler, we can use the schtasks.exe command line tool to alter the schedule to run more frequently.

To accomplish this, first copy the Key for the scheduled task you wish to modify.

Next, open a command prompt. The syntax for the command when using Vantage Ultimate is:

schtasks /change /tn “Vantage Ultimate […key…]” /ri <interval_in_minutes>

For example, if we want to alter the task above to run every 4 hours, the command would look like this:

schtasks /change /tn “Vantage Ultimate [87bfae7f-a476-4e4e-8f04-d801d58ca736]” /ri 240

You can verify the new task settings by entering the following command:

schtasks /query /tn “Vantage Ultimate [87bfae7f-a476-4e4e-8f04-d801d58ca736]” /v /fo list

The output will look similar to this:

With schtasks.exe, the interval range in minutes is 1-599940.