Every check is green and the tile is hours old
A consumer reports that a dashboard tile shows an old figure. Freshness monitoring is green, the serving dataset was published on time, row counts are normal, and querying the model directly returns the current number.
What you would do first
Answer before revealing anything. The value of the exercise is entirely in committing to a diagnosis you can be wrong about.
- 1Compare three timestamps: the newest complete period in the serving dataset, the dataset's publish time, and whatever the BI tool reports as the query time for the tile.
- 2Run the tile's query directly against the warehouse and compare the result with the tile.
- 3Check the BI tool's caching configuration for that dashboard, including any scheduled extract or materialisation it maintains.
- 4Ask whether other tiles on the same dashboard are also stale — a whole dashboard stale points at the cache, one tile stale points at its own dataset.
What is actually going on
The trap
The fix that looks right. Read it even if you got the answer — especially then.
Shorten the pipeline schedule so the data is fresher. The pipeline now runs more often at higher cost, the cache lifetime is untouched, and the tile is exactly as stale as it was — with the added problem that the team now believes freshness has been addressed.