# Metadata stale

ODD's catalog reflects the most recently ingested view of every source system. If a collector pauses, fails, or its source goes offline, the metadata for affected entities **goes stale** — the catalog row continues to render, but its ground-truth-on-the-source state is no longer guaranteed. The platform surfaces this with a per-entity **stale indicator** so users can distinguish "actively-maintained metadata" from "metadata of uncertain freshness".

## How the indicator surfaces

Stale entities are marked with an orange clock icon next to the entity name. Hovering the icon reveals the **last refresh timestamp** — the moment the platform last received an ingest for this entity.

<figure><img src="/files/GAHCYrgQ3RgBPrIzhAvW" alt="" height="390" width="700"><figcaption><p>Stale icon and last-refresh tooltip on a catalog entity</p></figcaption></figure>

The same indicator surfaces on:

* The [Catalog Overview](/features/data-discovery/catalog-overview.md) → Recommended panel tiles.
* [Search](/features/data-discovery/search.md) result rows.
* The [Directory](/features/data-discovery/directory.md)'s level-4 entity list.
* The entity's own detail page.

Wherever the entity name appears in the catalog, the stale icon appears next to it once the staleness window elapses.

## The freshness window

The platform considers an entity stale when its last successful ingestion is older than `odd.data-entity-stale-period` (integer; days; **default `7`**).

<figure><img src="/files/FfBfXn3XMsTe2BH7J10M" alt="" height="209" width="700"><figcaption><p>Default stale period in the platform configuration</p></figcaption></figure>

Operators running collectors on cadences longer than the stale window should raise the value to match — otherwise every entity from a slow-cadence collector flips to stale between scheduled runs even though the collector is healthy. The reference for tuning the value lives at [Configure ODD Platform → Detecting stale metadata](/configuration-and-deployment/odd-platform.md#detecting-stale-metadata).

## What the indicator does (and doesn't) signal

The stale icon means **"the catalog has not received an ingest for this entity within the configured window"**. It does not by itself diagnose **why**. Common causes:

* The collector is paused or stopped.
* The collector is running but the adapter is failing on this source.
* The source itself is unreachable (network, credentials, deletion).
* The collector's cadence is longer than the stale window (raise the window, or shorten the cadence).
* A specific entity was excluded by an [ingestion filter](/integrations/integrations.md) and is no longer reported even though peers are.

A stale icon is a discovery-time prompt — *"check whether this is still trustworthy"* — not a runtime alert. For platform-detected runtime issues (failed jobs, failed quality tests, schema-incompatible changes), see [Alerting](/features/active-platform-features/alerting.md).

## Where to next

* [Configure ODD Platform → Detecting stale metadata](/configuration-and-deployment/odd-platform.md#detecting-stale-metadata) — the operator-side reference for `odd.data-entity-stale-period`.
* [Catalog Overview page → Recommended panel](/features/data-discovery/catalog-overview.md#recommended) — where stale tiles surface explicitly with the orange icon.
* [Alerting](/features/active-platform-features/alerting.md) — the platform's runtime alert surface for failures (distinct from staleness, which is a freshness signal).
* [Data Discovery overview](/features/data-discovery.md) — the bucket landing this page sits under.


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