Viewing Timer Job History for a Specific Date and Time Period

Central Administration provides several ways to view timer job history for a SharePoint farm. From the Job History page, you can view by Service, Web Application, Server, Job Definition or Failed Jobs. This is a really useful resource when you’re analysing issues with a specific job or service. However, if you want to investigate by a particular time period then you don’t really have any options other than to click through page after page after page…

Image may be NSFW.
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Fortunately the job history is available to access through PowerShell. I found this TechNet forum post which pointed me in the right direction, and also a useful blog post and script by Dave Hancock. (Dave’s script looks like it does exactly what I needed but unfortunately I had issues getting it to run).

So, below is a script I’ve put together which I run in the Windows Integrated Scripting Environment to output a grid view of all timer jobs between two dates and times, for all web applications in the farm:

Update 19/12/2011: I’ve made a small modification (at the suggestion of Jaap Vossers) so that the script now lists any jobs that either start in the specified range, or end in the specified range.

cls
# Add SharePoint cmdlets reference
Add-PSSnapin microsoft.sharepoint.powershell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

function Get-TimerJobs {
    param(
        [DateTime] $startTime,
        [DateTime] $endTime
    )

    Get-SPWebApplication | foreach {
        $_.JobHistoryEntries |
             where{ ($startTime -le $_.StartTime -and $_.StartTime -le $endTime) -or
                    ($startTime -le $_.EndTime -and $_.EndTime -le $endTime) } |
                sort StartTime |
                select JobDefinitionTitle,WebApplicationName,ServerName,Status,StartTime,EndTime,@{Expression={($_.EndTime - $_.StartTime).TotalSeconds};Label="Duration (secs)"}
    }
}

$startDate = Get-Date "15/12/2011 11:00 AM"
$endDate = Get-Date "15/12/2011 11:50 AM"

$results = Get-TimerJobs -startTime $startDate -endTime $endDate
$results | Out-GridView

Which gives an output like the below (I’ve removed server name and web application name from the screenshot) from which I can easily spot if there are any failed jobs or jobs that took an unusually long time:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.