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doc_type: example title: Report Freshness Monitor summary: End-to-end Runline U example: monitor one or more reports and flag stale data. product: u tags: - pubsub - monitoring - stale-data use_case: Monitor published reports for stale data audience: intermediate

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Report Freshness Monitor

A monitoring workbook checks whether report timestamps are older than a configured threshold. This is useful for live dashboards where old data may still look valid.

Files Used in This Example

• Usage Examples source workbook
• Advanced Usage Recipes source workbook

Related Guides

• Check Report Freshness
• Report Freshness and Metadata
• Stale Data

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Step 1: Subscribe or Retrieve Metadata

Use a direct metadata lookup when the workbook needs a specific freshness field.

=U.GET_METADATA(report_group,report_name,metadata_key,TRUE,,)

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Step 2: Compare with Current UTC Time

Use an explicit freshness threshold in a visible input cell.

=U.CONVERT_DATETIME(U.NOW(5),"utc")-send_time_utc

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Step 3: Monitor Many Topics

Use the topics report when one workbook needs to watch multiple reports.

=U.TOPICS_REPORT()

What’s happening here?

A visible stale-data flag is safer than relying on the presence of any value. Live reports can still display the last known value after updates stop.