# Monitors Some questions you do not ask once but every night. Did all loads succeed? Are there tables without new rows since yesterday? Has the number of nulls in a column suddenly doubled? A **monitor** asks such a question at a fixed moment, and gives a verdict. ## What a monitor is A monitor has: - **A task in plain language.** For example: "Check whether all of last night's loads succeeded and whether every table in the staging schema has new rows." - **A schedule.** When it runs: every day at 06:00, every hour on working days, every Monday. The schedule works like a trigger in Azure Data Factory. - **A source.** What it looks at. At the agreed moment the platform starts an agent with that task. The agent looks, and gives a verdict: fine, or a deviation. ## Always look only A monitor always runs in the [work mode](/concepten/werkmodi) "look only". It reads and judges, but changes nothing. A monitor can therefore never "fix" a problem itself in a way you did not want. ## The verdict A monitor has to give a verdict. If the agent gives none, for example because it got stuck, that counts as a deviation. Silence is never "fine". - **Fine**: nothing happens, except that the run is recorded. - **Deviation**: a **finding** is created. You see it in the web app, with what the agent saw. Each monitor has at most one open finding. If the problem persists, findings do not pile up. :::accent A monitor that keeps failing If a monitor fails three times in a row, the platform switches it off and reports it. A check that never works does not give a false sense of security. ::: ## Time zone A monitor uses the time zone of whoever created it. "Every day at 06:00" means 06:00 for that person, in summer and winter time alike. ## From finding to conversation From a finding you start a conversation. The agent in that conversation gets the finding and can dig further, possibly in a different work mode. ## Examples | Monitor | Schedule | | --- | --- | | Did all of last night's loads succeed? | daily 06:30 | | Does a warehouse table have more than 5 percent nulls in a key column? | daily 07:00 | | Is a report dataset older than 24 hours? | hourly on working days | | Are there new tables without a primary key? | weekly on Monday | ## See also - [Work modes](/concepten/werkmodi) - [Environments and the landscape](/concepten/omgevingen) - [Dashboards](/dashboards/dashboards)