Scheduler 2.0

Our longest standing feature request was to improve Calibre’s test scheduler. What we've built aims to be straightforward and uncomplicated, exactly how we envisage Calibre to be.

The original scheduler was fairly opaque — sites were randomly allocated an hour of the day at which automatic snapshots were created. That time could only be altered by contacting support, which wasn't very convenient.

Customer needs varied, but by popular demands, scheduler definitely needed to:

• Not run at all
• Run hourly
• Run daily at a given time
• Run 2, 3 or 4 times per day
• Run weekly

It became clear that the new scheduler should be more versatile in order to be used successfully in many different scenarios.

⏰ New scheduler options

The new scheduling options should be extensible enough to accommodate most of performance testing use cases:

• Off - scheduler will not run at all. (Useful alongside CLI automation)
• Hourly - every hour, on the hour.
• Daily - every day, at a given time.
• Every X Hours - e.g. 'Every 3 hours', 'Every 72 hours'.

These scheduler options are uncomplicated enough for everyone to understand, and powerful enough to encompass all the needs of our customers.

🗺 Timezones support

One of the user-interface goals of Calibre is to always display time in a format that makes sense to humans, not machines. Calibre automatically detects your timezone and hides away the ugly details of UTC conversion.

Using scheduler

Scheduler is available to all accounts and can be found under Site → Settings → Agent Settings.

✨ Thanks

We couldn’t have created this solution without the patience and feedback of the Calibre community. Thank you for helping us learn and improve.

Ben Schwarz

Ben is the founder of Calibre. He regularly speaks at conferences worldwide and has been involved in far reaching open source projects as well as web standards. Find him on Twitter or LinkedIn.