Start all enabled timer jobs on a SharePoint 2010 farm using PowerShell and check their status

Starting a timer job is fairly easy with PowerShell on SharePoint 2010 using the Start-SPTimerJob command, but the script below walks through each timer job in the farm, checks that it is enabled for use (there’s not much point in trying to start a disabled timer job!), and then starts it:

Get-SPTimerJob | where { $_.IsDisabled -eq $false } | sort $_.Name | ForEach-Object {
    try
    {   
        $timerJobName = $_.Name
        if ($_.WebApplication -ne $null) { $waMessage = "on web application $($_.WebApplication.Url)" }
        else { $waMessage = "on Farm" }
        Start-SPTimerJob -Identity $_
        Write-Host "Started timer job $timerJobName $waMessage"
    }
    catch
    {
        Write-Host "There was a problem starting timer job $timerjobName:" $_
    }
}

This can be quite useful if you want to run everything in the farm before performing maintenance or as a test to ensure all timer jobs are operating successfully. Note that the script will report whether it is starting the timer job at the farm level or for each web application.

If you want to look at a report of the current status of each timer job, run the following script:

function Get-SPTimerJobStatus
{
    Get-SPTimerJob | sort Name | ForEach-Object {
        $lastRun = $_.HistoryEntries | Select-Object -first 1
        if ($_.WebApplication -eq $null) { $level = "Farm" }
        else { $level = $_.WebApplication.Url }
       
        $values = @{
            "Name" = $_.Name
            "Level" = $level
            "StartTime" = $lastRun.StartTime
            "EndTime" = $lastRun.EndTime
            "Status" = $lastRun.Status
        }
        New-Object PSObject -Property $values | Select @("Name","Level","StartTime","EndTime","Status")
    }
}
Get-SPTimerJobStatus | Out-GridView

This will produce a grid view showing each timer job, whether it was run at the farm or web application level, and the last run status, as shown in the example screenshot below: