Set freshness expectations

Who this is for: people who depend on a workflow’s result being ready at a certain time.

Before you start: a workflow you can edit. You change it on the workflow’s YAML tab, or ask your AI assistant.

A schedule says when a workflow should start. A freshness expectation says by when it must have succeeded. If no run succeeded in time, for any reason (the run failed, was skipped, never started, or the other system was down), Liitora tells you.

Add an expectation

Add expect: at the top level of the workflow:

name: Daily sales report
description: Every weekday morning, build yesterday's sales report and email it to the sales team.
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 7 * * 1-5"
      timezone: Europe/Helsinki
expect:
  succeeds_by: "09:00"
  on: weekdays
  timezone: Europe/Helsinki
  skip_on: [fi_public_holidays]
steps:
  # ...

This says: on every weekday that is not a Finnish public holiday, a production run must succeed between 00:00 and 09:00 Helsinki time.

The expectation starts being checked when the version is activated.

The keys

Key	Default	Meaning
`succeeds_by`	required	The deadline, `HH:MM` from `00:00` to `23:59`.
`from`	`00:00`	When the window starts, `HH:MM`.
`on`	`daily`	Which days have a deadline: `daily`, `weekdays`, `weekends`, or a list of days such as `[mon, wed, fri]`.
`timezone`	`UTC`	The IANA time zone for the times and days, such as `Europe/Helsinki`.
`skip_on`	none	Calendars whose days have no deadline: `fi_public_holidays`, `se_public_holidays`, `weekends`, `tenant_blackouts`. See Use calendars and holidays.

Day names in a list are mon, tue, wed, thu, fri, sat and sun, in any letter case, each listed once.

How the check works

Each matching day has one deadline: that day at succeeds_by.
The window runs from from to succeeds_by on the same day. If from is not before succeeds_by, the window starts the day before. For example from: "18:00" and succeeds_by: "06:00" means “between 18:00 yesterday and 06:00 today”.
The deadline is met by a succeeded production run of this workflow that finished inside the window. Both ends count: for a 09:00 deadline, a run that finished at 09:00:00 counts and one at 09:00:01 does not.
Test runs and dry runs never count.
Liitora checks about a minute after each deadline, so runs that finished right before it are counted. After an outage, every missed deadline is still checked.

When a deadline is missed

A freshness_violation incident opens, and your admins get an email (or the channel your alert rules name). See Set up alerts.
When a later run succeeds, the incident closes and you get a “works again” message.
A paused or inactive workflow has no expectation, so its deadlines pass without alerts. The same applies while your company’s account is restricted.

More examples

A nightly sync that must be done by 06:00, counting runs from 20:00 the evening before:

expect:
  succeeds_by: "06:00"
  from: "20:00"
  on: daily
  timezone: Europe/Stockholm

A report that is only needed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays:

expect:
  succeeds_by: "12:00"
  on: [mon, wed, fri]
  timezone: Europe/Helsinki