Azure DevOps Custom Maintenance Jobs

readme.md

These blocks of Azure DevOps Pipeline YAML can be used to scan for all the active build agents on an Azure DevOps instance and trigger a build on each.

The setup of the permissions as to how to setup these pipeline is detailed in this post which is an updated version of this post

agent-scheduled-job-yml

# This is the pipeline that runs any scheduled maintainance jobs
# we wish to run in addition to the built in Azure DevOps Maintainance jobs

# The parameters to target each pool and agent
parameters:
  - name: pool
  - name: agent
  - name: nvdapikey

# We cannot use to the parameters directly else we get a 'A template expression is not allowed in this context'
# However, if we alias them with a variable they work
variables:
  - name: pool
    value: ${{parameters.pool}}
  - name: agent
    value: ${{parameters.agent}}
  - name: nvdapikey
    value: ${{parameters.nvdapikey}}
 
trigger: none

pool:
  name: "$(pool)"
  demands: Agent.Name -equals $(agent)

steps:
  # wherever steps up wish to run on each agent

maintenance-job-scheduler.yml

# See https://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/rfennell/how-to-run-your-own-maintainance-job-on-azure-devops-pipelines/
variables:
  # filter to limit the scope of agent pools to consider
  - name: PoolNamePrefix
    value: "BM-"
  # the pipeline to run on each agent
  - name: BuildDefintion 
    value: "ScheduledMaintenanceBuild"

trigger: none

schedules:
- cron: '0 0 * * *'
  displayName: Daily midnight build
  always: true
  branches:
    include:
    - main

pool:
  name: BM-VS2022

steps:
- task: AzureCLI@2
  inputs:
    # The Azure Subscription is the link to a Service Principle
    # with permission to access the agent pools and queue builds
    azureSubscription: 'ScheduledMaintainanceJobs'
    scriptType: 'pscore'
    scriptLocation: 'inlineScript'
    inlineScript: |
      write-host "Find the agent pools with the prefix '$(PoolNamePrefix)'"
      $Pools = $(az pipelines pool list --organization $(System.TeamFoundationCollectionUri) --query "[? (starts_with(name,'$(PoolNamePrefix)'))].[id,name]" --output tsv)

      write-host "$($Pools.count) found"
      foreach ($pool in $pools) {
          # ugly but works with tsv format data
          $poolSplit = $pool.Split("`t")
          $poolID = $poolSplit[0]
          $poolName = $poolSplit[1]
          
          write-host "Find the agents the pool '$poolName'"

          $Agents = az pipelines agent list --organization $(System.TeamFoundationCollectionUri) --pool-id $PoolID --query "[?enabled].name"  --output tsv 

          foreach ($Agent in $Agents) {
              # trigger a build that uses agent-scheduled-job-yml
              $buildNameid = $(az pipelines run --organization $(System.TeamFoundationCollectionUri) --name $(BuildDefintion) --project $(System.TeamProject) --parameters "pool=$PoolName" "agent=$Agent" "nvdapikey=$(nvdapikey)" --query "name"  --output tsv )
              Write-host "Queued build $buildNameid on $agent"
          }
      }
  displayName: 'Trigger maintainance builds on all active agents'