Maintenance Periods
Overview
A maintenance period is a scheduled window during which Pingniner keeps checking a monitor but stops acting on the results. No triggers fire, no incidents open and nobody is notified.
This is what you want for a planned deployment, reboot or migration. Disabling triggers also stops the noise, but it relies on you remembering to switch them back on — and a monitor left silent after maintenance is worse than one that was never watched.
INFO
Checks continue to run and history continues to be recorded throughout. You keep the performance data; you just do not get paged for it.
Which monitors support it
| Monitor type | Maintenance periods |
|---|---|
| Sites | Yes |
| Servers | Yes |
| Pings | Yes |
| Ports | Yes |
| Heartbeats | Yes |
| Workstations | No |
| Blacklists | No |
Scheduling a maintenance period
- Open the monitor and go to its Maintenance tab.
- Click New maintenance period.
- Set Starts at and Ends at. Times are shown in your account timezone, so check that it is set correctly under Profile & Security.
- (Optional) Add a Description — what the work is, or a change reference. Your colleagues will thank you when they find the window later.
- Save.
The defaults are "now" and "two hours from now", which suits most ad-hoc work.
While a period is active
- The monitor's status changes to
Maintenance. - Triggers are not evaluated, so no incidents open.
- No notifications are sent on any channel.
- Checks still run and history is still recorded.
The Active column on the Maintenance tab shows which period is currently in effect, and Duration shows how long each one lasts.
WARNING
Maintenance status is applied by a background job that runs every few minutes, so a period starting "now" can take a moment to take effect. Schedule a minute or two of lead time before work that will definitely trip an alert.
When the period ends
The monitor returns to normal evaluation automatically. There is nothing to switch back on.
If whatever you were working on is still broken when the window closes, the next failing check starts the normal occurrences count and an incident opens as usual.
Maintenance and status pages
A monitor in Maintenance is shown as under maintenance on any status page it appears on, using the Maintenance in progress text you can customise under Appearance & Text.
Auto-updates will not publish an incident for a monitor that is in a maintenance window, so a planned reboot does not appear to your customers as an outage.
Maintenance and uptime figures
Time spent in a maintenance window is not currently excluded from uptime percentages. Downtime that occurs during maintenance still counts toward the figures shown on status pages and in uptime reports.
If you take a service down deliberately for an hour, expect that hour to appear in the month's uptime figure.
Best Practices
- Schedule before you start, not after the alerts arrive. The window only suppresses notifications from the moment it becomes active.
- Add a description. "Database failover — CHG-4821" is far more useful three months later than an unlabelled window.
- Keep windows tight. A maintenance period that runs all weekend hides real outages just as effectively as planned ones.
- Cover every affected monitor. A window on the site monitor does not silence the ping and port monitors pointing at the same host.