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Schedule tasks with Azure SRE Agent

Tip

Scheduled tasks help you by:

  • Catching problems before users notice because proactive monitoring replaces reactive dashboards
  • Correlating insights instead of showing raw metrics because your agent reasons across data sources
  • Letting you describe checks in natural language with no scripts to write or maintain
  • Letting you create, edit, and manage tasks from the portal or chat

The problem

Operational tasks repeat. Every morning someone checks resource health. Every Monday someone pulls cost data. Every hour someone scans for anomalies. These repetitive tasks consume your team's time with predictable, automatable work, which is better spent investigating real problems.

Traditional monitoring compounds the problem. Alert rules fire after a threshold is breached, and by the time you see it, users are already affected. Dashboards show raw data but don't explain what it means. Each alert is isolated: your CPU alert doesn't know about the deployment that happened ten minutes ago. You correlate manually, across tools, every single time.

How scheduled tasks work

Your agent runs tasks on a schedule you define. Describe what you want done in natural language, set the frequency, and your agent handles execution automatically. Each execution creates a conversation thread where the agent plans its approach, queries data sources, reasons about findings, and produces an actionable summary.

This process isn't a cron job running a script. Your agent uses its connectors, tools, knowledge, and memory to understand context. It notices that error rates are trending up 15% day-over-day even though they haven't reached the alerting threshold. It catches that storage usage will reach quota in three days at the current growth rate. It connects yesterday's deployment to today's exceptions.

Select Scheduled tasks in the left sidebar to manage all your tasks.

What makes this different

Alert rules Dashboards Cron jobs Scheduled tasks
When After threshold breached When you look On schedule On your schedule, before thresholds
What it shows Single metric Raw data Script output Correlated findings with explanation
Context None Whatever you configured What the script queries Cross-source, compared to baseline
Action You investigate You investigate Whatever the script does Summary with recommended next steps
Adapts Static rules Static views Static scripts Memory captures patterns over time

Unlike cron jobs, your agent understands natural language. Instead of writing scripts, you describe what needs to happen. Unlike runbooks, scheduled tasks execute automatically with the autonomy level you choose.

Before and after

Before After
Check dashboards manually every morning Agent checks proactively and posts summary
Correlate alerts across tools by hand Agent correlates across all connected sources
Issues discovered after users report them Trends caught before they become incidents
Write and maintain monitoring scripts Describe checks in natural language
Each team member checks differently Consistent automated checks every time
Need to change a task? Delete and recreate Edit any task in place with execution history preserved

Task dashboard

The dashboard displays three key metrics at the top:

Metric Description
Active tasks Tasks currently enabled and running on schedule
Total tasks All tasks including paused and completed
Total runs Completed executions across all tasks

The task list shows each task with sortable columns:

Column Description
Name Task identifier that you select to view execution history
Task status On, Off, Ended, or Failed
Schedule Human-readable format (for example, "Daily at 8:00 AM")
Created by User who created the task
Last run Most recent execution time
Next run Upcoming scheduled execution
Completed runs Total successful executions

Editing a task

Modify any scheduled task directly by changing the schedule, updating instructions, reassigning the custom agent, or adjusting run parameters. The system preserves your task's execution history.

Three ways to edit

Method Steps
Toolbar Select a task checkbox, and then select Edit task in the toolbar.
Row menu Select ⋯ on any task row, and then select Edit task.
Execution view Select a task name to open execution history, and then select Edit task.

The edit dialog opens with all current values prepopulated. Change any combination of fields:

  • Task name and instructions: Update what the agent does.
  • Schedule: Change frequency, time, or switch to a custom cron expression.
  • Response custom agent: Reassign to a different custom agent.
  • Date range: Adjust start date or set a new end date.
  • Message grouping for updates: Switch between same thread or new threads per run.
  • Set a run limit: Add, change, or remove the maximum execution count.
  • Agent autonomy level: Switch between Autonomous and Review mode. When you select Autonomous, an info icon (ℹ️) appears. Select it to review the Autonomous mode acknowledgment, which explains agent boundaries, AI model limitations, your responsibilities, and liability terms.

Select Save to apply your changes.

Note

Save is disabled until you modify at least one field, preventing accidental no-op updates.

Example use cases

Use case What the agent does
Daily health check Reviews resource health, checks for degraded services, reports findings
Cost anomaly detection Compares spend to baselines, flags unexpected increases
Security posture review Checks for misconfigurations, expired certificates, open ports
Deployment verification Verifies recent deployments are healthy after rollout
SLA reporting Generates weekly availability and performance summaries

Example task prompts

Daily health check:

Review the health of all container apps in resource group prod-apps. Report any apps with restarts in the last 24 hours, memory usage above 80%, or error rates above 1%. Compare current error rates to last week's average.

Cost anomaly detection:

Analyze Azure cost data for my subscription. Compare today's spending rate to the 7-day average. Flag any resource group where spending increased more than 20%.

Related content

Capability What it adds
Execute Mitigations Take action when monitoring detects problems
Workflow Automation Chain tasks with triggers, custom agents, and notifications
Send Notifications How the agent delivers findings to your team
Run Modes Control agent autonomy per task
Connectors Access third-party observability tools
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