Monitor the job queue

The job queue runs reports, background posting, synchronisations and other scheduled tasks in Business Central. When a job queue entry fails and stops, many people only find out when a customer or a colleague asks. The article shows how to get notified when an entry fails, how to restart it and how to send errors to Power Automate. It can be set up in under an hour.

Status and errors

Each job queue entry has a status. New entries start as On Hold, and you set them to Ready. When an entry is running, it is In Process, and if something goes wrong, it shows as Error. The Job Queue Entries page shows the list, and the action Log Entries shows the history of an entry.

An entry with an error stops and does not run again by itself. Microsoft Learn says that in that case you have to restart it yourself.

Get notified about errors

Start the Set Up Job Queue Notifications guide from the Assisted Setup page. Here you choose who is notified: the person who started the job, job queue administrators or both. You also choose how: with a message at the top of the home page or through a Power Automate flow.

You can choose to be notified immediately or only after a number of failed entries. The message has buttons to restart the job and to see details. You can turn the notification on and off under My Notifications.

Power Automate

Business Central sends an external business event when a job queue task fails. Your flow must subscribe to the event Job queue task failed. Microsoft has made a template that sends a message in Outlook, and a guide helps you get started.

That way the message can go to a shared mailbox or to Teams, so that it does not depend on one person's home page.

Restarts and repeated stops

The first step is to restart the entry. You can set it to On Hold and then Ready. If that does not help, the error may be in the code. In the stack of the error log you can see who published the code, and then you contact either the partner who supplies the extension or Microsoft.

For the enquiry you need the ID of the job queue entry, the time of the error and your time zone. The action Copy details on the log entries page gathers the information.

On the entry you can specify the maximum number of attempts and the delay between attempts. That helps if the error is caused by an external service that is temporarily down, for example a bank connection.

Do not set the recurrence interval too short. Microsoft Learn warns that frequently repeated jobs can affect performance, and recommends the longest interval that makes sense.

Check that critical jobs are Ready after an environment copy, because they are stopped in the copy.
Use category codes if jobs must not run at the same time.
Review the list monthly and remove jobs nobody uses.

Recipients and focus

Notifications only work if someone reacts. Choose a small group with a clear division of roles, and make sure someone is present during holidays. If the message goes to a shared mailbox or a Teams channel, more people can see it.

Give the recipients a short instruction: check the log entry, restart the entry, and contact the partner if it fails again.

Look in particular at jobs that send email, post in the background, synchronise with other systems or fetch bank data. Customers and colleagues feel those first when they stop. The job queue's earliest start date/time field shows when the next run happens, and it can differ if many entries compete.

Telemetry and control

With Application Insights you can follow the lifecycle of job queue entries and set up alerts that send an email, a text message or a message in Teams. It requires telemetry to be set up for the environment.

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