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#10 Pull agents

Pull-based task orchestrator

Each host runs an agent that pulls "jobs" from an endpoint and reports results. Foundation of any SCCM-less fleet.

Implementation: 1-2 days for the skeleton 4 technologies
The pain

What it costs you today

In a fleet of 500 to 2,000 endpoints without SCCM or Intune, the current distribution pattern depends on GPO startup scripts, manual psexec or .bat files left in a share: the admin has no way of knowing who ran what, what failed or where things are pending. The typical consequence is that a remediation script deployed on Friday at 5 pm runs on 38% of the fleet, fails silently on 22% and is not even attempted on the remaining 40%. When the script breaks 50 PCs, the admin finds out from the tickets that arrive on Monday. The pentest detects the pattern and notes "insufficient change control" as a finding. The lack of orchestration also limits growth: any project that requires deploying configuration, software or telemetry to the fleet starts from zero. "We have no way of knowing which patch was applied on which machine" is the phrase that summarizes the technical debt. How many things we are not knowing happened or did not happen in the fleet?

The value

What changes when you have it

On day one each server and workstation runs an agent that every 5 minutes queries an HTTPS endpoint (API, SharePoint list or JSON file), pulls the list of pending jobs for its hostname, executes the associated script with the arguments, captures stdout/stderr and reports the result back with a POST. The owner of the dashboard is the operations team, which now sees the fleet state in real time: jobs executed, in progress, failed, upcoming. The visible output is the web dashboard (Power BI or simple HTML), the historical CSV and the Teams alerts to the responsible parties. A retail firm with 800 servers deployed a critical patch in 4 hours with 100% visibility, vs. the 2 weeks of the previous process. The investment pays back with the first critical deployment, typically 2 to 4 months.

Stack
Technologies we touch in the implementation
PowerShell 7Invoke-RestMethodTask SchedulerSharePoint list / API
Pull-based task orchestrator
#10 · Pull agents

Pull every N minutes → central endpoint → result reporting

Technical references
Pull agents

I want to implement this

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