Maintenance Windows

Maintenance windows temporarily suppress alert evaluation during planned maintenance activities, deployments, or infrastructure changes.

When a maintenance window is active, covered alerts are not evaluated, and no new incidents are created. This prevents unnecessary alert noise during planned work.


Key Concepts

  • Only one maintenance window can be active at a time.

  • Creating a new maintenance window automatically supersedes the currently active window.

  • A maintenance window can target:

  • Specific alert IDs

  • All alerts

  • Alerts can be added to or removed from the active maintenance window.

  • An active maintenance window can be deleted to end maintenance early.


How It Works

During the configured maintenance period:

  • Alert evaluation is skipped.

  • No incidents are generated.

  • No notifications are sent.

Once the maintenance window ends, normal alert evaluation resumes automatically.


Maintenance Window Configuration

A maintenance window contains:

Field

Description

start_time

Time when maintenance begins

end_time

Time when maintenance ends

alert_ids

List of alerts covered by the window

disabled

Indicates whether the window is disabled


Managing Maintenance Windows

Maintenance windows are managed through the Alerting Service REST API:

/api/{cluster}/maintenance-windows

Supported Operations

Method

Endpoint

Description

GET

/maintenance-windows

List all maintenance windows

GET

/maintenance-windows/active

Get the active maintenance window

POST

/maintenance-windows

Create a maintenance window (replaces existing active window)

POST

/maintenance-windows/active?alert_ids=

Add alert IDs to the active window

DELETE

/maintenance-windows/active?alert_ids=

Remove alert IDs or delete the active window

Pause vs Maintenance Window

Both features help reduce alert noise, but they behave differently:

Feature

Alert Evaluation

Incident Creation

Notifications

Pause

Continues

Yes

Suppressed

Maintenance Window

Suppressed

No

None


When to Use Pause

Use Pause when you want alerts to continue generating incidents for later review, but do not want notifications or pages during a specific period.


When to Use a Maintenance Window

Use a Maintenance Window when planned work is expected to generate known alert conditions and you want to suppress evaluation entirely so that no incidents are created.