Report schedules in Sites keep pausing

[StillGoing]

I'm really trying to migrate our users to our Lansweeper Sites instance, mostly so we can start leveraging a lot of the new features which are tied to it. But some of the behaviour just baffles me.

Why do the report schedules keep getting paused? For instance, on the main General Overview dashboard (the first thing users see), the "AD Users" widget keeps getting paused. It is schedule to refresh daily, and I know there are always going to be changes, but every time I bring it up, it is in a paused state. In fact, I manually ran it this morning (it has not run in the past week), and immediately after it ran, it returned to the 'Paused' state.

I have attached a screenshot of the message displayed if I hover over the 'pause' symbol. This is not the only such instance; I see this across the site for many of the regularly schedule reports. If someone can actually explain what this 'status' means and how we can fix it so our scheduled reports actually run on schedule, I would be very grateful.

Using Sites seems to be inevitable, but this kind of mysterious behaviour is a real stumbling block.

[StillGoing]

Thanks for the thorough explanation. I expect this will be less of a problem as we use the Cloud site more. As it stands, the users are used to the Classic interface, so until we start leveraging functionality that is unique to the Cloud site, its a tough sell.

[FrankSc · Accepted solution]

Hello StillGoing,

We've applied a specific scenario for scheduled reports based on the usage of a site. So, in short, if a scheduled report is not viewed frequently, its schedule could be disabled.

This is the full description: 
The message appears when users are inactive for a defined period. The application tracks how many times a scheduled report is not consumed and calculates the percentage of consumed reports for each one of them. The approach will vary based on the report’s scheduling frequency:
 

• For Schedules with 'Hours' or 'Days' Frequency:
  • The application will check the consumption percentage for the past 3 days during each report execution.
  • If the consumption percentage is below 25%, the report scheduling will be automatically disabled.
• For Schedules with 'Everyday' or 'On Specific Days' Frequency:
  • The system will check the consumption percentage for the past 7 days during each report execution.
  • If the consumption percentage is below 50%, the report scheduling will be automatically disabled.

A report is considered consumed if:

• A user opens the report results page, or
• A board displays data from the report widget.

Reports that do not have any executions during the validation period will not be disabled. Depending on the nature of certain reports, it might be a good idea to change the schedule or even disable it to prevent this message.
 

[eepps2-uiuc]

I am running into a similar problem, however, my use case is a little different. I have reports that I am accessing through the API once per month. These are custom reports created specifically for once-monthly, automated execution. Since there is (as far as I can see) no way to execute a report from the API, I needed to schedule reports to update regularly and then grab the latest execution. However, when the report is paused, what happens is that I receive stale (and thus inaccurate) results. I cannot schedule the report to execute monthly to reduce server load, so my only option is to schedule it daily. If I need to set a reminder to manually execute or unpause the reports monthly before my automated export runs, it kind of defeats the purpose of automating the report.

I can understand the reason for automatically pausing the reports, but the limited scheduling options and inability to run the report directly from the API in this case actually ends up creating a lot more server load for reports like this.