Scheduling Dashboard Refreshes

During the transition to scheduled refreshes, admins must keep in mind the site default refresh rate, the refresh schedule per dashboard and the overall refresh capacity.

Site Default Refresh Rate

The default refresh rate is the rate at which most dashboards on the site should run. The default for Automatic Refresh Rate is normally every 24 hours. The rate should ideally be set in such a way that dashboard refreshes are able to run without being queued and waiting for other dashboards to first complete their refreshes. In general, there will probably be more dashboards and charts than can refresh every 10 minutes. If all dashboards and charts are set to refresh every 10 minutes, they will always be behind.

Be smart about what to set the default refresh schedule. Some things to keep in mind to help guide your decisions:

1. How often does the data on the database change?
2. How fresh do the majority of the dashboards have to be?
3. How will the freshness expectations on most reports change as more reports are created?
4. Are there any critical reports? If yes, how much refresh time does it require to keep them up-to-date?
5. How much load can the database handle?

If the answers to these questions change, the default refresh schedule can always also be changed, which will update the refresh rate for all dashboards set to the default schedule.

Scheduling Specific Dashboards

Once the site default has been set, admins can then focus on the dashboards they'd like to set specific schedules for. Generally these are dashboards that need to be kept at a certain level of freshness.

Things to consider:

1. What is the data freshness SLA of these dashboards?
2. How often does the data on the database change?
3. If the database is configured for the Sisense Cache, how often does the cached data update?
4. How long does it take to refresh the dashboard?

Refresh Capacity

Dashboard refresh rates should be scheduled so that there are not more refreshes than can be run in the scheduled time. Over-scheduling refreshes can cause a constant backup of the refreshes that are scheduled.

Here are a few options to tackle over scheduling:

1. Improve the query runtimes of the charts by making them more efficient
2. Upgrade the database so that it can run queries faster
3. Remove filters from the dashboard if they are not required, or reduce the number of shared dashboards
4. Audit the dashboards that have scheduled refreshes and remove any unused dashboards or decrease the frequency of certain dashboards