Scheduling alerts and dashboard exports with cron schedules

Two things in Qvasa run on a clock: alert conditions (which watch your widgets and notify you on breaches) and scheduled dashboard exports (which deliver a snapshot of a dashboard to Slack, email, or a user group). Both are configured from a bar at the top of the dashboard itself, and both use the same scheduling engine: cron expressions in UTC. This guide shows how to set up each one, and how to use cron to express real-world schedules — like business hours in your timezone — that a simple "daily at 9am" picker can't.

Before you start

Workflows must be enabled on your account, and you need permission to manage them. If you don't see the scheduling controls described below, reach out to the Qvasa team.
Alert conditions live on alert (workflow condition) dashboards; exports can be scheduled on any dashboard.

How Qvasa schedules work: cron, in UTC

Every schedule is a five-field cron expression: Minute, Hour, Day of Month, Month, and Day of Week. Each field accepts:

* — every value ("every hour", "every day")
A single value — 13 in the Hour field means 13:00 UTC
A range — 1-5 in Day of Week means Monday through Friday
A comma list, including lists of ranges — 0,30 in Minute, or 14-23,0-2 in Hour
A step — */5 in Minute means every 5 minutes

All times are UTC — that's the server time Qvasa's scheduler runs on. Every minute, the scheduler checks each active schedule against the current UTC time and runs whatever matches. UTC never observes daylight saving time, which makes schedules perfectly predictable — but it means you convert your local hours to UTC once when you set the schedule, and if you care about exact local wall-clock times, you nudge the hours when your region changes to or from daylight saving.

Here's the payoff, and the example we'll use throughout: business hours in US Pacific time. A Pacific workday (roughly 7am–7pm PT) crosses midnight in UTC — it runs from 14:00 UTC through 02:00 UTC the next day. Cron handles that with a comma list of two ranges in the Hour field:

14-23,0-2

That single expression — "hours 14 through 23, and 0 through 2, UTC" — is a Pacific business day. Add 1-5 in Day of Week and you've scoped it to weekdays. This is why cron is powerful: precise minutes, hour windows that wrap midnight, weekday scoping, and month-boundary runs are all expressible in one compact schedule.

Scheduling a dashboard export

Open any dashboard and click the calendar icon next to the dashboard title ("Schedule Dashboard Export"). The export bar opens across the top of the dashboard with three sections: Export Status (active or not, last/next export, and whether the image covers the first tab or all tabs), Schedules, and Destinations.

Click + Add Schedule to open the schedule lightbox. Presets cover the common cases (Every Hour, Daily 9am ET, Weekdays, First/Last of Month), or fill the cron fields yourself — here with the Pacific business-hours window in the Hour field:

Export specifics:

Exports run at most once per hour, so the Minute field must be a single value (like 0), not *.
An export can have up to 3 schedules.
The export won't run until it has at least one active schedule and a destination — add a Slack channel, email list, or user group under Destinations. The status section warns you until both are in place.

Scheduling alert conditions

Alert dashboards carry their own command center bar: Alert Status, Schedules, Notifications, and optional Capacity Changes. The alert conditions themselves are set per widget — click the bell icon on a widget (in edit mode) to define its threshold. The schedule then controls when those conditions are evaluated: on every matching minute, Qvasa checks the widgets and notifies your channels if a condition breaches.

Click + Add Schedule in the Schedules section. The alert lightbox adds minute quick-fills (*/2, */5, */10) and presets like East Coast Business Hours or Weekends Only. Here's a weekday Pacific business-hours alert that checks every half hour:

Alert specifics:

Alerts can run as often as every minute — great for queue-height monitoring during peak hours.
Up to 3 schedules per alert, and they combine — a common pattern is one aggressive schedule for business hours and a slower one for nights and weekends.
The schedule doubles as quiet hours: if the schedule doesn't match, the alert simply doesn't evaluate, so a business-hours-only schedule means no pages at 3am.
An alert needs a schedule, at least one widget condition (the bell), and a notification channel before it goes active — the status section tells you what's missing.

Handy schedule recipes

Weekday Pacific business hours, every 30 minutes: Minute 0,30 · Hour 14-23,0-2 · Day of Week 1-5
Daily 9am Eastern export: Minute 0 · Hour 13 (14 during standard time)
Every 5 minutes during London mornings: Minute */5 · Hour 8-12 · Day of Week 1-5
Month-end report: Minute 0 · Hour 17 · Day of Month L (L = last day of the month)

Troubleshooting

No calendar icon on the dashboard? Workflows aren't enabled for your account or your user lacks the workflow-management permission — reach out to the Qvasa team.
Schedule saved but nothing runs? Check the status section: exports need a destination, alerts need a widget condition and a notification channel. The warning banner lists exactly what's missing.
Runs are an hour off? Daylight saving time — your local offset from UTC changed. Adjust the Hour field to the new offset.