When building runbooks in Orchestrator, you might find that there are values that must be incremented, such as keeping track of the number of backup attempts that a runbook made. Counters enable you to modify and check the status of a number that you can use to keep track of important statistics.

Counters can only be modified by the Modify Counter activity and read by the Get Counter Value activity.

Important
You cannot run multiple, simultaneous jobs for runbooks that contain Modify Counter activities because simultaneous jobs of the same runbook that modify (set, reset, increment, or decrement) a counter can cause the counter value to become unreliable. You can, however, read the value of counters in runbooks that run simultaneously.

For additional help, please refer to the on-line documentation for System Center 2012 - Orchestrator.

Use the following procedures to create a counter and organize counters.

To create a counter

  1. From the Connections pane, double-click the Global Settings folder, right-click the Counters folder or a subfolder of the Counters folder, point to New, and then click Counter to open the New Counter dialog box.

  2. Type a Name for the counter.

  3. Type a Description that explains the purpose of the counter.

  4. Type the Default Value of the counter. This value is the starting value of the counter when it is created or reset.

  5. To modify a counter, double-click the counter.

    To remove a counter, right-click the counter, and then select Delete.

  6. Click Finish.

To organize counters

  1. You can group counters into folders to organize them. To create a folder, right-click the Counters folder, point to New, and then click Folder.

  2. To move a counter to a different folder, right-click the counter, and then click Move to open the Select a Folder dialog box.

  3. Select the destination folder, and then click OK. The counter is moved to the new folder location.