Schedules and cron

This page covers everything about controlling when an agent runs — the friendly options in the wizard, raw cron expressions, timezones, expiration, manual-only agents, and the org's minimum-interval rule.

Friendly schedule options

The wizard's Frequency dropdown offers ten options, each of which compiles to a standard five-field cron expression behind the scenes:

Where you see {hour}, {minute}, or {days}, those values come from the Hour / Minute / day-of-week pickers that appear conditionally based on the frequency you chose. Every N minutes shows its own minutes input (1–59); your org's minimum-interval rule still applies, so a very short cadence may be rejected on save.

Note

On a self-serve trial, the sub-hourly options are unavailable. A trial organization is clamped to a minimum of one hour between runs, so Every 15 minutes, Every 30 minutes and any Every N minutes value are rejected on save. The clamp lifts when the trial converts to a paid subscription.

Custom cron expressions

Expand Use a raw cron expression to override the friendly options with a five-field cron string:

┌───────────── minute (0–59)
│ ┌─────────── hour (0–23)
│ │ ┌───────── day of month (1–31)
│ │ │ ┌─────── month (1–12)
│ │ │ │ ┌───── day of week (0–6, Sunday = 0)
│ │ │ │ │
* * * * *

Examples Strata accepts:

• 0 9 * * 1-5 — 09:00 every weekday.
• 0 */2 * * * — every 2 hours on the hour.
• 30 14 * * 0,6 — 14:30 on weekends.
• 0 9-17 * * 1-5 — every hour 09:00 through 17:00, weekdays only (the "business hours" pattern used by the built-in SQL anomaly watcher template).

The expression is validated server-side with cron-parser. Anything it can't parse returns Invalid cron expression: <reason>. Empty or whitespace-only cron is also valid — it means "manual only, no schedule".

Timezones

Pick a timezone from the Timezone dropdown. The default is your timezone from Settings > General (or your browser's timezone if the setting hasn't been saved yet). Strata uses Intl.supportedValuesOf('timeZone') to populate the dropdown, so every IANA name is available.

The next-run timestamp is computed in the agent's timezone, not the org's or the server's. 0 9 * * 1-5 in America/New_York fires at 09:00 Eastern, which means a server in UTC sees it fire at 13:00 (or 14:00 during EDT).

Expiration date

Click Add an expiration date under the schedule sentence to bound how long the agent runs. Type a YYYY-MM-DD value or pick one from the calendar; backspace clears it. After this date, in the agent's own timezone, the scheduler stops picking the agent up and clears its next_run_at.

Reviving an expired agent. Clearing the expiration date, or moving it to a future date, brings the agent straight back: Strata recomputes the next run from its existing cron and the agent resumes on its normal cadence. You do not have to re-enter the schedule or redeploy.

Two details worth knowing:

• An agent that is paused (Active off) stays paused when you lift the expiry — reviving the schedule and resuming the agent are separate decisions.
• A manual-only agent has no cron to revive to. Lifting its expiry simply makes Run now and its webhook work again.

Manual Run now against an expired agent returns Agent has expired. Update or extend the expiration date to run it. (HTTP 400). Webhook triggers return Agent has expired.

Manual-only agents

Choose Manual only (no schedule) when you want an agent that only runs when you explicitly trigger it — from the Run now button or its webhook. Strata stores schedule_cron = null, which the scheduler poll skips entirely.

Manual agents appear on the Agents list with Manual in both the Schedule column and the Next column (not a dash). They count toward your Total stat and toward the org's max_agents_per_user quota, but never toward daily run caps unless you actually trigger them.

Use manual agents for:

• One-off tasks you want to keep around as repeatable building blocks.
• Webhook-driven workflows where the trigger is an external system.
• Tasks you only want to run after a teammate's review.

Org-enforced minimum interval

Your admin can set a minimum interval between runs (min_agent_interval_seconds on the organizations row). When you save a schedule that fires more often than the threshold, Strata returns:

Schedule is too frequent: your organization requires at least Ns between runs (this schedule fires every ~Ms). Pick a less frequent cadence.

The check is run on both POST /api/agents and any PATCH that changes the cron. The estimator handles the common patterns (*, */N minute and hour fields); for more exotic expressions it doesn't second-guess you. Manual-only schedules are never blocked.

On a self-serve trial, a floor of 3,600 seconds (one hour) applies whether or not your admin set one. It is a clamp, not a replacement: if your admin's own minimum is longer, theirs still wins. Scheduled agents are the largest unattended cost in a trial — one agent on a five-minute cron fires roughly four thousand times over fourteen days — which is why the floor exists. Legacy indefinite-trial organizations are unaffected.

How the next run is computed

The scheduler polls once a minute. On every poll, the leader instance picks up agents whose next_run_at <= now, fires them, and immediately writes the new next_run_at for each one (computed from schedule_cron in the agent's timezone). Daylight-savings transitions are handled by the underlying cron-parser library — Strata doesn't reinvent that math.

If an agent has accumulated five consecutive failures, the scheduler skips it for an hour, then resumes normal scheduling. (See /docs/agents/permissions for what counts as a failure.)

If a run is throttled — the AI model is rate-limited or temporarily unavailable (an HTTP 429 or 503 from Azure AI Foundry) — Strata doesn't count it as a failure. Instead it defers that scheduled agent's next run by 15 minutes and retries, without consuming the agent's regular slot or incrementing its consecutive-failure count. Throttled runs are recorded in run history with a throttled status and never trigger a failure email.

Run now

On the agent's detail page (or in the row actions on the Agents list), click Run now to fire the agent immediately, independent of its schedule. The run is recorded with trigger_type=manual. Run now works even on paused or manual-only agents.

Dry runs

A dry run executes the agent's prompt with destructive tools (send_email, save_to_onedrive, run_python, write_jira, write_confluence) stripped from the toolset. The AI sees an extra system-prompt line:

DRY RUN: Tools that send email, save files, or run code are disabled. For any such step, describe in writing what you would have done — do not pretend it succeeded.

Result lands in run history with trigger_type=manual-dry. Use dry runs to verify behavior before granting destructive permissions.

The dry-run option is reached programmatically — POST /api/agents/:id/run?dry=1. (You can also pass dry: true in the request body.)

What can go wrong

• Invalid cron expression: ... — your cron didn't parse. Check the five-field format and the value ranges.
• Schedule is too frequent: ... — see the minimum-interval section above. Pick a less frequent cadence.
• Agent has expired. Update or extend the expiration date to run it. — manually triggering an expired agent. Edit the agent and push the expiration date out (or remove it).
• The agent ran in the wrong timezone — verify the Timezone field on the schedule step. Strata uses the agent's own timezone for next-run calculations, regardless of org or server timezone.
• The agent didn't run when expected — five consecutive failures pushes its next run back by an hour. Check the agent's recent runs and fix the underlying error (missing extension, expired credentials, bad cron). The last_run_status column on the Agents list shows the most recent outcome.
• A run shows throttled — the AI model was rate-limited or briefly unavailable. This isn't an error and isn't counted against the agent; Strata defers the next scheduled run by 15 minutes and retries automatically. No action is needed unless throttling persists across many runs.

Related

• /docs/agents/create — the wizard, step 2 in context.
• /docs/agents/webhooks — triggering manual agents from outside.
• /docs/admin/rate-limits — admin-side min_agent_interval_seconds and max_agents_per_user.