reconciliation dashboard shows "data refresh failed" error every morning at 6am

TL;DR

A refresh that fails at the same time daily is a scheduled-job problem: expired source credentials, a query that times out under morning load, or an upstream job that has not finished when the refresh starts. Open the refresh history, read the actual error for the 6am run, and compare with a manual refresh. Fix the scheduled path: renew the credential the job runs under, move the refresh after its upstream dependency, or trim the query, rather than refreshing manually forever.

reconciliation dashboard shows "data refresh failed" error every morning at 6am

Use this when

• The dashboard shows data refresh failed each morning, first seen at the 6am scheduled refresh.
• Manual refresh during the day may succeed, or fail differently.
• The dashboard depends on overnight jobs, bank feeds, or a warehouse load.

Not for this skill when

• The dashboard fails at all times for all users. That is a dashboard or source outage, not a schedule issue.
• The data is correct but stale because the source system stopped sending. Follow the feed investigation, not the dashboard job.

Steps

1. Open the dashboard refresh history and record the exact error and duration for the last three 6am runs. Verify: the scheduled failure mode is stated from logs, not the banner text
2. Run a manual refresh and compare outcome and duration with the scheduled runs. Verify: you know whether the failure is schedule-specific or universal
3. Check the refresh job's data source connection and the account it runs as for expiry or permission changes. Verify: the job's identity can still read every source the dashboard uses
4. Check the timing of upstream jobs the dashboard reads, and whether they finished before 6am on the failed days. Verify: the dependency chain timing is mapped
5. Apply the matching fix, reschedule after upstream completion, renew the job credential, or optimise the failing query, and watch the next 6am run. Verify: the scheduled refresh succeeds unattended

Variant phrasings

dashboard data refresh failed every morning scheduled

The morning-failure phrasing.

reconciliation dashboard refresh error 6am job

Searching by the scheduled symptom.

Compatibility: Dashboard refresh scheduling in Power BI, Tableau, Looker, and ERP-embedded rec dashboards fed by scheduled queries.

Why it happens

Scheduled refreshes run as a service identity, against whatever state upstream jobs have reached by that hour, under the platform's heaviest load window. Manual refreshes run as you, later, against settled data, so they pass while the schedule fails, which misleads diagnosis toward the dashboard itself. The consistent clock time is the fingerprint: real data problems do not keep office hours, but job chains and credential expiries do.

Edge cases / pitfalls

• Token and credential expiries for service accounts are the classic silent cause, often exactly a round number of days after setup.
• If the upstream warehouse load slipped later over months, a refresh that once had slack now races it. Compare upstream finish times over time.
• Alert on refresh failure to the team channel; a banner noticed at 9am means three hours of decisions on stale data.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pstO2WbtV05t77ImL0ns2WjA