Triggers & schedules
Decide what starts an execution — on a schedule, conversationally, or from your code.
A trigger is what starts an execution of a deployed agent or workflow. Compass supports a few ways to kick one off, with more on the way.
Schedules
A schedule runs a deployment automatically on a recurring timetable. You manage schedules on a deployment's Triggers tab.
To add one, use the New schedule builder:
Pick how often
Under Repeat, choose Hourly, Daily, Weekly, or Monthly.
Set the timing
For hourly, pick the minute past the hour (At minute). Otherwise pick At time (UTC), plus the days of the week (On these days — Monday to Friday to start) or the day of month where it applies.
Confirm
A plain-language preview (for example, "At 09:00 AM") shows exactly when it will fire, with the cron expression it's saved as. Click Add schedule.
Existing schedules are listed with both that human-readable description and the underlying cron expression, and each can be switched on or off, or deleted. Pausing a deployment suspends all of its schedules at once.
Schedules run in UTC
Times are set and shown in UTC, so a schedule fires at the same absolute moment regardless of where your team is.
Conversationally
You can run an agent or workflow on demand through Compass Chat — add it in the composer's Tools, set to Live for the deployed version or Draft for your latest edits, and ask chat to do the job. This is the quickest way to run something interactively.
From your code
You can trigger executions programmatically through the API, which is the right path for integrating Compass into your own systems. See API, CLI & SDK.
What's coming
Coming soon
Additional trigger types are planned but not yet available in the UI:
- Run now — a one-off manual execution from the deployment page.
- Webhooks — start an execution from an incoming HTTP request.
- Events — start an execution when a matching event occurs.
Seeing how an execution started
Every execution records what triggered it, shown as a label in Observability:
- Manual — started on demand by a person or your code: Compass Chat, the API, or an upload to a dataset.
- Scheduled — fired by a schedule, including a dataset source's sync schedule.
- Test — a run of a draft rather than a deployment.
- Solution — started by a solution's own application.
Executions an agent or workflow starts as tools or steps carry their parent's label. This makes it easy to tell automated work from work someone kicked off by hand.
Next
Managing deployments
Promote and roll back versions, bind connections, watch a deployment's activity, and pause or archive it.
Compass Chat
Work with Compass conversationally — run your agents and workflows, search your datasets, ask about executions, and draft changes — with streaming replies and full traces.