Schedule properties

An event triggers when all the conditions of a schedule are met. If a condition is blank, it's considered as always met.

Name

Name of the schedule, and is the name referenced in other setup screens.

Timezone

The timezone in which the settings below take place. For example, when Hours is 16, the schedule triggers at 4pm in the selected timezone.

Second

Seconds in which to trigger. The range is 0 (start of the minute) to 59, and the list is comma-separated.

Important: Do not leave Seconds blank. Set the value to a non-zero integer in the range of 1 to 59.

Minute

Minutes in which to trigger. The range is 0 (start of the hour) to 59, and the list is comma-separated. When left blank, it triggers every minute, which is not recommended.

Hour

Hours in which to trigger. The range is 0 (midnight) to 23, and the list is comma-separated. When left blank, it triggers every hour.

Days of Month

Days of the month (comma-separated integers) on which to trigger. When left blank, it triggers every day.

Month

Months in which to trigger. Leave all months unselected (all on the left) to trigger every month.

Days of Week

Days of the week on which to trigger. Leave all days unselected (all on the left) to trigger every day.

On Missed Schedule

What to do when a schedule failed to trigger, such as because the server was down or because of a daylight savings time adjustment.

• Wait for next — Do not trigger any missed schedules; wait for the next schedule.

• Run once — Trigger the first missed schedule and then wait for the next schedule. Use this option for all important schedules.

• Run all — Trigger all missed schedules and then wait for the next schedule.

Next Trigger In

Display of the amount of time until the schedule is next triggered. 

Next Schedules

Display of the when the next ten times the schedule triggers. Use this to verify your settings. To see more than ten, click Show more schedules.

Tips and behavior

General considerations

• Feed Pull vs. FTP — Often, the time at which a process should be scheduled is dictated by the company's business needs. For example, invitations should be sent at 9:00am every morning. However, remember that FTP and SFTP feeds are also usually on a schedule. Because they are controlled by the company, you must take them into consideration when scheduling processes across an instance. If the company can reliably drop a file at the desired time, use SFTP feed. If not, upload the file on an external FTP and configure a feed pull.
• Large vs. Small Processes — Do not schedule more than 1 large and important process at the same time. Allow enough time in between schedules for the first process to complete. This minimizes the load on the instance and makes troubleshooting easier. Independently, small processes are not a concern. However, if you have small processes scheduled for the same time, they can overwhelm Experience Cloud. This is especially relevant for multi-market/multi-program instances.
• Triggering Post-Processing Actions — If processes are dependent on each other, use post-processing actions to trigger another feed pull or export file after the current process instead of using an additional schedule. This ensures that one process completes before the next begins.
• Scheduled Maintenance/Downtime — Scheduled maintenance/downtime is currently on a quarterly basis and is usually at a time that minimizes impact to users. However, for companies that are sensitive to delays in scheduled processes consider an accelerated schedule.
• Web feeds — Though web feeds are not set on a schedule, processing options available. If web feed volume is high, they should be configured to run synchronously by selecting Run concurrently. Asynchronous processing is useful for testing and for low volumes. The other processing option is web feed file grouping which queues requests within the specified time, and processes them together (as configured by the Seconds to wait for grouping property.) You can use this option only when Run concurrently is not selected. For more information, see Web Feeds.
• Broadcaster — Broadcaster is a shared resource and is subject to delays based on its load. If invitation-delivery time is highly sensitive, consider scheduling the process outside of the peak time. Note that it is possible to configure the invitation send date/time via Auto Importer. U.S. Broadcaster's peak time is 11:00am - 2:00pm Pacific time. Europe Broadcaster's peak time is 12:00am - 3:00am Pacific time.
• Monitoring — When possible, schedule file processing during work hours in case an issue arises. Automated monitoring reports are available, but a human must be available to interpret them and take action.

Visualize Scheduled Processes

To visualize all scheduled processes for the company, members of the Medallia Expert Service team can use the Scheduled Processes Auditor to add scheduled exports, feed pulls, push reports, and sampling to a Google Calendar.

Missed schedules

It is possible that a schedule is missed; typically due to scheduled maintenance/downtime. For such occurrences, a recovery mode (On missed schedule property) is available. The default and recommended setting is to have the schedule Run once after the missed schedule, for which the first missed schedule is triggered as soon as the application is able, and waits for the next schedule that has not already been triggered.

For example, consider a schedule that is set to run every two hours, and the 2:00pm schedule is missed. The application is back up at 7:00pm, so it triggers the process once and waits until 8:00pm to run it again (the missed 4:00pm schedule is run and the 6:00pm schedule is ignored). If a schedule's recovery mode is Run all, all of the missed schedules behave as if Run once is selected and they are all triggered once the application is back up.

Daylight Saving Time

All Medallia Experience Cloud instances are based on Pacific time, which means scheduled processes might be impacted when Daylight Saving occurs for Pacific time and not the local time of the instance or the user. (A process whose schedule is controlled by the company is impacted by the company’s local time.) For example, a company in Switzerland has a scheduled file drop to an SFTP feed at 9:00am Central European time (1:00am Pacific time). However, during a brief period in March, the file drop occurs at 2:00am Pacific time (9:00am Central European time) since Daylight Saving occurs on different days for each timezone.

Feed pulls set on an hourly schedule are not impacted at the time the clock moves forward or backward. When using feed pulls, Experience Cloud pulls all new files. If a file is missed due to Daylight saving, it is pulled at the next schedule. When the clock moves backward, the back-end is turned off for approximately an hour so schedules do not repeat.