Overview
Scheduled generation errors occur when a document configuration with a recurring schedule fails to produce a document at the expected time, produces it late, or runs without delivering a notification. Unlike on-demand generation, scheduled failures are silent by default and often go unnoticed until a stakeholder reports a missing report.
Business value
Diagnosing scheduled generation errors quickly prevents missed reporting cycles from affecting governance, compliance, or stakeholder review processes. Most issues trace to a small set of causes: an expired Service principal secret, a misconfigured schedule, or a disabled notification channel.
How it works
Azure Documenter evaluates the schedule stored in each document configuration and triggers generation automatically at the configured day and time. The generation run uses the same Service principal, subscription scope, publish destination, and notification settings defined in the configuration. If any of these are misconfigured or stale, the scheduled run fails silently unless notifications are enabled.
Turbo360 notifies account owners 7 days before a Service principal's client secret expires. If the secret expires without being rotated, every configuration using that Service principal stops generating on schedule without any error surfaced in the UI.
Troubleshooting
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Scheduled generation stopped running with no notification
Cause: the client secret for the Service principal used in the configuration has expired. All configurations using that Service principal stop generating silently once the secret expires.
Fix: in Azure Documenter, navigate to Service principals, locate the affected Service principal, and check its expiry date. Rotate the client secret in the Azure portal, then update the secret value and expiration date in Azure Documenter. See Service principal permission errors for the full rotation steps. -
Scheduled generation runs but no notification is received
Cause: no recipient email address was entered in the Notifications step of the configuration, the notification channel is misconfigured, or the email was filtered by the recipient's spam or quarantine rules.
Fix: edit the configuration, navigate to the Notifications step, and verify that a recipient email address is entered and an email template is selected. Trigger an on-demand generation to confirm notification delivery. If the email does not arrive, check the recipient's spam folder and confirm the sending domain is not blocked. -
Scheduled generation runs at the wrong time
Cause: the time set in the Schedule step is interpreted in UTC, not the local time zone of the team expecting the report. A schedule set to 06:00 generates at 06:00 UTC, which may correspond to a different local time.
Fix: edit the configuration and adjust the scheduled time in the Schedule step to account for the UTC offset of the intended audience's time zone. For a team in IST (UTC+5:30), a report expected at 06:00 IST should be scheduled at 00:30 UTC. -
Scheduled generation produces an empty or incomplete document
Cause: the Service principal no longer has Reader access to one or more subscriptions in the configuration's scope. Azure Documenter generates with the data it can access and silently omits the rest.
Fix: verify that the Service principal has Reader access on every subscription included in the configuration. Trigger an on-demand generation to confirm the output is complete before relying on the schedule again. See Service principal permission errors. -
Scheduled generation runs but the document does not appear in the configured destination
Cause: the Azure Storage account or Document360 project configured as the publish destination is no longer accessible. Storage access keys may have been rotated, or the Document360 API token may have expired.
Fix: edit the configuration and navigate to the Publish settings step. Verify the publish destination details and update the storage connection string or Document360 API token as needed. Trigger an on-demand generation to confirm the destination is reachable before the next scheduled run. -
Multiple scheduled configurations run at the same time and some are delayed
Cause: several configurations share the same scheduled time. Concurrent generation across multiple configurations with large subscription scopes increases total processing time, causing later runs to queue behind earlier ones.
Fix: stagger the scheduled times across configurations by at least 15 minutes. See Scheduling recommendations for guidance on offsetting concurrent configurations.