Schedules allow to configure the recurring or one-time execution of Plans, enabling automated, time-based workflow execution for tasks like synthetic monitoring and beyond.

Description

Let’s describe the Step schedules view: You can access it by clicking “Schedules” on the sidebar menu:

Here is the column description:

• Name: the name of the schedule. Click the schedule name to modify the schedule
  • Name tooltip: a tooltip supporting HTML rendering is optionnaly added if a Descritpion has been set for this schedule
• Environment: the environment in which the Plan will be executed
• Cron Expression: the Cron expression used to trigger the associated Plan
  • Cron Expression tooltip: a tooltip containing the list of time range exclusions will be displayed if any were defined
• Status: only active schedules are executed - click on the status to toggle it
• Action: options that let you open the linked plan, execute, edit, delete or analyze the schedule

Create and configure schedules

A schedule is defined by following properties:

• Name: the name of the schedule
• Plan: the plan to be executed
• CRON expression: define when and at which frequency the plan is executed. While the expresions are CRON based, a UI wizard helps to easily define your schedule.
• Description: a description for this schedule which will be displayed as a tooltip on the schedules view (HTML rendering supported)
• CRON Exclusions: optianally provide CRON expression(s) for excluding time ranges. (Example: for a schedule set to run every 5 minutes, you can exlucde the execution on weekends with “* * * ? * SAT-SUN” )
• Execution parameters (Optional): the values for each execution parameters (i.e. Environment) as defined in customization
• User (Optional): to execute the plan on behalf of provided username. Note: logged-in user must have sufficient right to delegate the execution, and the user on behalf must have sufficient right to execute the plan
• Assertion plan (Optional): the assertion plan to be evaluated after each plan executions

Assertion plan

An assertion plan declares assertions to be performed on the series of executions of a schedule. It is executed after each execution of the schedule and triggers an event of type “Scheduler: Assertion of task failed“ upon failure. You can subscribe for notifications of such event by email or webhooks.

Typically an assertion plan consists of one or more AssertMetric controls that specify the assertions. AssertMetric can be for instance used to ensure that the number of failures of the executions related to a schedule remains below a defined threshold.

Schedules global settings

As an admin user, you have access to modify the Schedules global settings.

To do this, go to Admin Settings -> Scheduler, then enable scheduler. This lets you enable or disable the Scheduler globally across all projects, and you can still execute the schedules manually if needed.

You can also specify the user for which the schedules should be executed. If the field is left empty, the schedules will be executed for the user who created it.

Please note that the Schedules are greyed out when the Scheduler is disabled globally. In this case, even Schedules showing “Active” status will not be executed.