This case should not happen to you unless the TFS machine is crashed just after the TFS installation.
In my case, I installed clean TFS and upgrade from TFS 2008 to 2010 without any problems. Just after the upgrade the IT guy decided to remove a disk storage that caused the OS to crash.
We tried to restart the server without any luck. And then, the IT guy chose "restore to last good configuration" option when the OS loaded. The TFS went back and everything worked fine so I could not realized that the "Visual Studio Team Foundation Background Job Agent" service was not listed on the OS services.
After 1 week we started to notice that the TFS did not work as we used to…
· Iterations and Areas – administrators can add new Iteration\Area values but team members could not see those values inside the iteration\area fields inside work item forms.
· Reporting services stop refreshing – even though it seemed to be in progress inside the TFS Admin console
· Alert stopped working also. Usually the TFS notifies in the event viewer that something is wrong with the notification but I found no relevant information there.
So, what is going on here???
TFSJobAgent service is gone! Vanished! The TFS continued to work (almost) I mean the source control\work items\build\documents were on and up to date…
I performed some Bing search but no result about this subject. So I installed the service manually. Just run this command:
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\InstallUtil.exe /LogFile="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\TfsJobAgent\TfsJobAgent.InstallLog" /LogToConsole=true /username=Domain\ TFSSERVICE /password=PSW TFSJobAgent.exe
After that the service was listed in the services window (services.msc)
All alerts were fired; the reporting was refreshed and displayed all the data. The event viewer was started to be filled with TFS notifications (informations, not errorsJ)