Sync and Data Freshness
How often your data refreshes, how to check that it did, and what to do when it does not.
Everything you see on the dashboard, and every decision that comes out of it, is only as good as the age of the data behind it. This page covers how data gets refreshed and how to confirm that it has.
API sources
API connections refresh automatically once a day, at 06:00 UTC. In Ontario that is early in the morning local time, so the first person in on a weekday sees data from overnight.
Each run reads from your vendor, aggregates to postal areas, and replaces the team's metric values.
Syncing on demand
You do not have to wait for the daily run. On /home/<team>/integrations, each configured source has a Sync Now action that runs it immediately.
Use it after you change credentials, after you change the selected areas or metrics, or when you know something significant has just changed at source.
Sync history
The same page shows, for each source:
- the status of the most recent sync
- when it ran
- how many regions it brought back
- an expandable History list of previous runs, each with its status and, when it failed, the error message
This is the first place to look when the numbers seem wrong. A sync that failed three days ago and has been failing since is the single most common cause of "the dashboard says something that isn't true".
When a sync fails
| Error | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Authentication rejected | The vendor credential has been rotated or revoked |
| Host not found / connection refused | The base URL or site number is wrong, or the vendor is down |
| Zero regions returned | The credential is valid but points at an empty or wrong account |
| Fewer regions than expected | The vendor is not returning everything, or the area selection is too narrow |
Fix the cause, then use Sync Now rather than waiting a day to find out whether it worked.
The dashboard does not go blank when a sync fails — it keeps showing the last values that worked. That is deliberate, but it means a failure is invisible unless you look. Check the data-freshness indicator on the Monitoring dashboard.
CSV sources
CSV data does not refresh on its own. It changes when someone uploads a new file, and not before.
Re-upload from /home/<team>/integrations. The new file replaces the previous data entirely, so it must contain every region and every area, not just what has changed. See CSV Upload.
For active caseload management, weekly or monthly is a reasonable cadence. Put it in someone's calendar — nothing in the platform will chase you for it.
The freshness indicator
The Monitoring dashboard shows how old the team's data is. Get into the habit of reading it before you read anything else on the page.
Treat it as a gate on decisions:
- Hours old — fine for anything.
- A few days old — fine for trend and structural work; be careful with anything that depends on current staffing.
- Weeks old — refresh before you run an optimization or send a report. A report is a document with a date on it that someone will still be quoting in six months.
A weekly habit
- Open
/home/<team>/integrations. - Confirm the last sync succeeded, or upload a current CSV.
- Glance at the sync history for a pattern of intermittent failures.
- Then go and look at your numbers.
It takes under a minute and it is the difference between acting on your operation and acting on a snapshot of it from last month.