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Content was updated: Jun 15, 2023
This is an archived version of the documentation downloaded from LogScale Documentation Archives. Up to date documentation, and documentation for later versions, is available on LogScale Documentation

## Scheduled Searches

##### Security Requirements and Controls

- `Change triggers and actions` permission

A scheduled search is a static query, set to run on a schedule. At a scheduled interval, the query will run and if its result is non-empty, the scheduled search will trigger its associated actions.

### When to Use Scheduled Searches

Scheduled searches are related to Alerts and they are able to trigger the same actions. However, scheduled searches are applicable in other use cases than alerts, such as when:

- You need to automatically report some search result on a schedule. For instance, you have stakeholders that expect to get an email every Monday at 10:00 containing the top most important security events for the previous week.

- You have an ingest delay on some logs, which results in them never appearing in searches made by alerts. For instance, if an alert looks back in time using a `1h` time window, it won't trigger on logs ingested with a 12-hour delay. With a scheduled search, you can choose to run your search at a point in time, where you're fairly certain that every log of interest has been ingested.

- You need to take delayed action on search results. For instance, if you trigger user bans using an alert, offending users will be banned immediately upon a transgression and can then easily figure out what triggered their ban. Using a scheduled search, you can choose to ban all offending users at the same time every day, as to obscure the conditions of a ban.

If your situation doesn't fall into one of these use cases, you should probably use an alert instead. Alerts run as live queries, rather than historic ones, and should thus generally be considered more performant.

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