Limits with hourly Notebook scheduling and maximum number of scheduled tasks

[Katie_Clark]

Hello,

Per this post from March 2025, users in ArcGIS Online can have up to 10 scheduled tasks for Notebooks.

I manage several data ETL workflows for an organization that rely heavily on Notebooks for automation. For one of our Notebooks, we had to modify it to run at specific hours instead of "hourly" due to some quirks with the data API. Specifically, we now have it triggered to run in the mornings at 5am, 6, 7, 8, and 9am, and in the evenings at 4pm, 5, 6, 7, and 8pm. So, that reaches the limit of 10 scheduled tasks (Repeat Type = "Day" at the specified time). 

I now have another ETL notebook that I want to schedule and I'm unable to because I've reached the limit. I guess my main question of this post is....Is there a better way to go about scheduling at specific hours like this? It would be ideal to only have one scheduled task where I could specify the times of day to run, similar to how you can specify days of the week when you schedule an hourly task.

Any other suggestions or workarounds? Thanks!

[Jay_Gregory · Accepted solution]

if you can't actually have it run every hour, you could put some code at the beginning of the script to check the time and if its within one of your allocated hours run the rest of the script and if its not, exit.  

[Katie_Clark]

Great idea, Jay - thanks! I ended up adding this code in a cell at the beginning of the notebook, seems to be working well!

# Get current time in US Central timezone
central_time = datetime.now(ZoneInfo("America/Chicago"))
current_hour = central_time.hour
print("Central hour:", current_hour)

allowed_hours = {5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20}

if current_hour not in allowed_hours:
    print("Not a scheduled hour, skipping execution")
    raise SystemExit()

[BobBooth1]

You could export the notebook to a PY script and set it up to run on a machine on your system with a Windows Scheduled task.

This tutorial shows the process:

https://learn.arcgis.com/en/projects/schedule-automated-near-real-time-data-updates/

[Katie_Clark]

Thanks @BobBooth1 , for my use-case I needed the workflow to stay in ArcGIS Online, but the tutorial you linked to is also a good resource!