Forge gives you two common ways to run work on a schedule of events: web triggers (someone calls you) and scheduled triggers (Forge calls you). Picking wrong creates either missed SLAs or noisy empty runs.
Use a web trigger when
- An external system already emits webhooks (billing, monitoring, forms).
- You need near-real-time create/update in Jira.
- The caller can authenticate (HMAC / bearer) and retry.
Use a scheduled trigger when
- You must poll an API that has no webhooks.
- You reconcile drift nightly (ERP ↔ Jira, Assets imports).
- Work is batch-oriented and can tolerate minutes of delay.
Combine both
Pattern we ship often: web trigger for hot path + scheduled job for reconciliation. Hot path stays fast; schedule cleans duplicates and missed events.
Operational checklist
- Idempotency keys on both paths.
- Alert on schedule miss (Forge invocation metrics).
- Document timezone assumptions for cron-like schedules.
- Keep schedules sparse—prefer event-driven when the vendor supports it.
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