Cron-style Alarm Trigger

[keilorblend360]

Hey there, 

I've set up an action I'd like to run at 12:30am EST every night. I've set up my trigger as the following: 

wsk trigger create test-t4l \                                                                  
  --feed /whisk.system/alarms/alarm \
  --param cron "30 0 * * *" \
  --param stopDate "2021-10-31T23:59:00.000Z"

The trigger is created successfully and when I "get" the trigger, it shows the correct cron schedule. However, I checked the activation logs this morning and the action did not run until 4:30am.

Am I missing a timezone difference or something? I noticed the datetime for when my action is saved is +4 hours compared to EST. 

[duypnguyen]

Hi @keilorblend360 , the alarms are scheduled in UTC timezone. I hope it should have been fired at the correct time then? Otherwise, please let us know.

[keilorblend360]

Yeah that kind of stinks. We recently had to adjust all of our action CRON triggers for daylight savings. Every time-based trigger shifted an hour ahead. Anything running at 5am, ran at 4am, etc.

[keilorblend360]

Also updating a cron trigger never works. I updated a cron trigger yesterday from 2:03 to 2:30(yay typos) and the action still ran at 2:03.

[duypnguyen]

As mentioned earlier, the cron triggers are based on UTC. So yes, if there is a daylight saving in your timezone, you would need to adjust the triggers.

Wrt updating cron time, you're right it's not possible to update alarms feed once created. You could instead create a new trigger with correct time feed (2.30), then update the rule to map to the new trigger.