Hello, I am having some trouble with the frequency of alert evaluation. We want to trigger alerts after data in our system has been synced, and are using the REST API to do but the problem we have is that there is still a scheduled evaluation even though we are handling this ourselves with an API call. We can set the evaluation frequency to be very infrequent but as near as I can tell we can't have automatic evaluation completely disabled. Is this possible to disable or is there a cron expression that we can use that will never trigger?

The knowledge sources do not explicitly mention any way to completely disable automatic alert evaluation, nor do they document a “never fires” cron expression. What is documented: - Alerts always have an evaluation frequency, inherited from the organization or overridden per dashboard or per alert via the

schedule.cron

attribute. [[Alerts eval freq](https://www.gooddata.com/docs/cloud/create-dashboards/automation/alerts/#evaluation-frequency)] - Evaluation frequency can be customized with cron, but GoodData supports triggering alerts at most once per hour; the docs focus on valid schedules, not on disabling them. [[Alerts eval freq](https://www.gooddata.com/docs/cloud/create-dashboards/automation/alerts/#evaluation-frequency); [Cron expressions](https://www.gooddata.com/docs/cloud/create-dashboards/automation/scheduled-exports/#cron-expressions)] - The API example for an alert always includes a

schedule

block with a

cron

expression and timezone. [[Alerts API example](https://www.gooddata.com/docs/cloud/create-dashboards/automation/alerts/#evaluation-frequency)] There is no documented option to: - Turn off evaluation entirely for an alert, or - Use a special cron expression that is guaranteed never to trigger. The only documented controls are: - Organization‑wide evaluation frequency (admin setting). [[Automation eval freq](https://www.gooddata.com/docs/cloud/create-dashboards/automation/#evaluation-frequency)] - Per‑dashboard override for new alerts. [[More control over frequency](https://www.gooddata.com/docs/cloud/whats-new-cloud/#more-control-over-alert-evaluation-frequency); [Dashboard eval freq](https://www.gooddata.com/docs/cloud/create-dashboards/automation/alerts/#evaluation-frequency)] - Per‑alert override via API using

schedule.cron

and

schedule.timezone

. [[Alerts eval freq](https://www.gooddata.com/docs/cloud/create-dashboards/automation/alerts/#evaluation-frequency)] Given this, based on the available documentation: - You can make evaluation very infrequent (e.g., via a long‑interval cron), - But there is no documented way to fully disable automatic evaluation or to define a cron that is guaranteed never to run. If you need strict “manual‑only” triggering, the docs do not show a supported configuration for that; you would need to rely on a very infrequent schedule as a workaround, or contact GoodData Support to confirm if there is any non‑public option.

Hello Kyle. As our AI mentioned, there is really no way to set a “never fires” cron expression. Could it be the solution to set cron to the 29th of February? Or maybe you can provide us with more details about the flow you are using so we can advise you better.

We sync data once per day typically, and when this sync has completed successfully we invalidate the cache and would like to then trigger alerts as data may have changed. The timing of the sync may change, or be run more or less frequently so we would like to handle triggering alerts ourselves based on the sync rather than a cron schedule. Is there a way I could put in a feature request for either adding some way to disable automatic alert evaluation, or to tie it to cache invalidation? The documentation mentions that we should match evaluation frequency with cache invalidation for optimal results so it would be nice if there were an option to have alerts trigger automatically on cache invalidation.

Hi Kyle. Thank you for sharing your situation with us. There is actually one way to set the automation to "never fire": 1. You need to pause the alert. 2. Then you can use the API endpoint to trigger them when you want. The API endpoint is:

/api/v1/actions/workspaces/{{WORKSPACE_ID}}/automations/{AUTOMATION_ID}/trigger

Let us know if it helped you.

We did think about doing this, however we want to respect the user's selection about whether their notification is paused. We are going to use the trigger endpoint either way, we were just hoping their may be an easy way to stop the default trigger entirely without pausing all alerts. Sounds like we may just have to work around it for now.