7.1 ticket escalation cron despite having no ticket escalations setup

[xyzulu]

Despite having no ticket escalation rules setup, every 5 mins (when system cron is run) the following is logged in my admin activity module:

 

System

Automated Task: Starting Ticket Escalation Rules

 

This makes the admin activity module fairly useless now, as this is the only recent activity being logged. Any suggestions on how to resolve/disable this?

 

 

PS 7.1 is looking good otherwise!

Edited December 15, 2016 by xyzulu

[lance]

We are getting the same issue also

[xyzulu]

I have opened a support ticket about this. I'll let you know how that goes.

Edited December 15, 2016 by xyzulu

[lance]

Appreciated Brad, many thanks.

[rpvw]

I also saw endless entries regarding running the escalation cron in the logs and i do not use ticket escalations, and so I tried following the instructions at http://docs.whmcs.com/Crons and configured the cron job to read

*/5 * * * * php -q /home/username/crons/cron.php skip --TicketEscalations 

(Substitute your own path as necessary)

 

That seemed to work beautifully if you don't want the escalations to run at all.

 

Perhaps an option to suppress logging would be appropriate if you do want to run them ?

[xyzulu]

I've had a reply. WHMCS say this is by design and intended behaviour

 

Pretty much ruins the activity widget to have log spam show up every 5 mins.

[lance]

Yeah agree, my system activity log has goten big...

 

18838 Records Found, Page 1 of 189

 

Pain as we dont have escalation rules set at all... so dont even need this...

[xyzulu]

Agree. I don't think this was thought through.

 

Perhaps contact them yourself as well as submit a feature request. If the right people see the folly of logging this particular action it might get changed.

[ITWolfy]

We having the same issue now finding the log useless now as it is being spammed every 5 min by the cron and the tickett escalation that we dont even use.

 

There has to be a way to get around this as this log is very important to us running our business.

[xyzulu]

I've submitted a feature request to address this as I was advised to do so. It's currently awaiting moderation. I have also gently tried to get the support person who updated my ticket to escalate this to someone else ie a developer

 

Here is a small sample of the now fairly useless activity log that WHMCS support explained to me is intended behaviour. They said, and I quote: "As part of the new updates to the cron functionality, this is intended behavior."

 

 

I have pages and pages of pretty much the same thing.

 

That being said, I do feel WHMCS will eventually address this relatively minor issue to resolve, as I doubt this was in fact intended behaviour.

Still, it's been a rather painful process. It doesn't even seem like staff are interested in listening to feedback, or that they even feedback what they see on these forums to their support staff. I hope I'm wrong.

Edited December 17, 2016 by xyzulu

[xyzulu]

Some good news..

 

First of all a guy named Karl Flemming emailed me via my own website the following:

 

I tried to answer the thread on the WHMCS forums a couple of days ago, but I am still waiting for my 'moderated' post to be approved.

 

Since, I don't use any ticket escalations, I use the following in the cron job :

*/5 * * * * php -q /path/to/cron.php skip --TicketEscalations

 

This stopped all the log entries about something I didn't use, and may work for you as well

 

Please see http://docs.whmcs.com/Crons for more information which is where I found this work-round.

This is an excellent workaround. Thanks Karl.

 

WHMCS, please approve Karl's post, he deserves the credit for this.

 

Second, while I felt I have had to push harder than I feel I should have as a paying customer.. it seems from a recent update to my ticket with WHMCS on this issue it's finally been seen by the right people. It sounds like the developers are now discussing this (despite brushing me off at first, telling me to open a feature request and then declining that). I'm hopeful this tiny issue will get the attention it deserves so that the activity log can once again be a useful feature of WHMCS.

[ITWolfy]

Much Thanks To Karl!!! & Brad !! Thank you man I appreciate you both for getting this sorted. I will update Karls rep as soon as he gets approved.

[xyzulu]

Side point: I've submitted a bug report as the activity log is going well over the limits you set in Setup > General

These unneeded logs spoken of in this ticket are just adding to the uncontrolled size of the activity log now.

[atlanticadigital]

Thank you very much Karl!!! & Brad !! for your job.

[keyboardmls]

I have added skip --TicketEscalations to my only cron and notifications still appear in the activity log every 5 minutes. Does anyone know what could possibly prevent this from working? Thanks for the help!

[xyzulu]

I have added skip --TicketEscalations to my only cron and notifications still appear in the activity log every 5 minutes. Does anyone know what could possibly prevent this from working? Thanks for the help!

 

From my investigations the only way to resolve that is to use a different php cli than just "php".

Use the command: whereis php

.. to find a cli that may work for you.

 

You can troubleshoot via ssh yourself using the ../cron.php -vvv switch FYI

 

I hope it helps

[WHMCS John]

Side point: I've submitted a bug report as the activity log is going well over the limits you set in Setup > General

Client-related logs are maintained indefinitely for audit trails and PCI compliance. The Activity Log length setting applies to general "System" entries.

[rpvw]

Update that may clear up some problems some people have experienced.

 

You can now call '/usr/local/bin/php' if you need the php-cli binary, and '/usr/bin/php' if you need the CGI variant.

 

If you call 'php' only via the CRON, you're going to end up using the CGI binary, since '/usr/bin' comes first in the CRON $PATH.

 

You will probably also need to turn on register_argc_argv in your PHP configuration to get this to work.

[keyboardmls]

Update that may clear up some problems some people have experienced.

 

You can now call '/usr/local/bin/php' if you need the php-cli binary, and '/usr/bin/php' if you need the CGI variant.

 

If you call 'php' only via the CRON, you're going to end up using the CGI binary, since '/usr/bin' comes first in the CRON $PATH.

 

You will probably also need to turn on register_argc_argv in your PHP configuration to get this to work.

 

This got it working for me, thanks!

[vinc1402]

Please do a proper fix for the next versions.

 

Activity log is filled with this "Automated Task: Starting Ticket Escalation Rules"

 

 

Its hard to track changes now.

[xyzulu]

Please do a proper fix for the next versions.

 

Activity log is filled with this "Automated Task: Starting Ticket Escalation Rules"

 

 

Its hard to track changes now.

 

See the solution here: https://forum.whmcs.com/showthread.php?122446-7-1-ticket-escalation-cron-despite-having-no-ticket-escalations-setup&p=494002#post494002

[CavalloComm]

This is not a solution? We actually USE ticket escalations, so we run that CRON job every 5 minutes or so, and the log is FULL of this - so we can't really see what happened before? I don't want to skip them at all.

 

Question also would be - do we still need a SEPARATE cron for ticket escalation anymore? (Such as this: crons/cron.php do_escalations) or does that run with the main cron every 5 minutes and does not log? Perhaps we are doing this by running it separately?

[WHMCS ChrisD]

This is not a solution? We actually USE ticket escalations, so we run that CRON job every 5 minutes or so, and the log is FULL of this - so we can't really see what happened before? I don't want to skip them at all.

 

Question also would be - do we still need a SEPARATE cron for ticket escalation anymore? (Such as this: crons/cron.php do_escalations) or does that run with the main cron every 5 minutes and does not log? Perhaps we are doing this by running it separately?

 

Esclations are handled by the cron running every 5 minutes, no need to have a seperate one specifically for esclations.

[CavalloComm]

Will this stop it from posting to the log since I have been running this separately?

[xyzulu]

No it won't