Weird timer jobs

Sometimes when you look at the timer jobs associated with the PowerPivot service application you see these weird entries:

So where do they come from and what do they do?

Ans: It just so happens that one of the little known aspects of PowerPivot is that we have written a series of health rules that scan the SharePoint system looking for unusual circumstances. For example, we try to identify machines with the wrong version of various dlls on them, such as ECS machines that haven’t upgraded their msolap oledb provider to PowerPivot’s R2 version, or WFEs that don’t have ADOMD.NET installed on them (which we need to generate the PowerPivot Mgmt Dashboard, things like that . . . These timer jobs come from that subsystem. Don’t panic — it is just your friendly local SharePoint system trying to keep everyone well and working happily along.

Enjoy.