Maintenance windows

A maintenance window tells Aloft “I’m doing planned work, don’t panic.” For the monitors you select, while the window is active Aloft will not open incidents and will not send alerts — even if the monitors fail their checks. When the window ends, normal monitoring resumes cleanly.

You’ll find maintenance windows under Maintenance in the top navigation.

What a window does

While a window is active, every check on a selected monitor is still recorded, but Aloft holds back on alarms:

• No incidents open. A monitor that fails during the window won’t open an incident.
• No alerts fire. Your notification channels stay quiet for those monitors.
• The confirmation gate is protected. Aloft freezes each affected monitor’s consecutive-failure count at zero during the window. That means the first check after the window ends starts from a clean slate — a monitor has to fail its full confirmation count all over again before an incident opens, so the window ending never causes an instant false alarm.

Monitors that aren’t selected for the window are unaffected and keep alerting as usual.

Creating a maintenance window

1. Go to Maintenance and click New window.
2. Enter a Name (for example, “Quarterly DB upgrade”).
3. Set Start and End date-times. The end must be after the start.
4. Choose a Recurrence: Once, Daily, or Weekly (see below).
5. Under Suppress alerts for these monitors, check every monitor the window should cover. (If you have no monitors yet, create one first.)
6. Click Schedule window.

To change a window later, click Edit on its row; to remove one, click Delete.

How recurrence works

The Start and End you enter always define the first occurrence of the window. What recurrence does is decide whether — and how — that occurrence repeats:

• Once — the window is active exactly once, for the single Start-to-End range you entered. After it ends, it never reactivates.
• Daily — the window repeats every 24 hours. The Start time sets the time-of-day it begins each day, and the window stays active for the same duration each cycle.
• Weekly — the window repeats every 7 days. The Start sets the day-of-week and time it begins, and the duration is preserved each week.

For recurring windows, the duration (End minus Start) is what’s preserved on every cycle — so a one-hour first occurrence is a one-hour window every day or every week. A recurring window never activates before its first Start.

Telling whether a window is active now

On the Maintenance list, any window that is active at this moment shows an Active now badge next to its name. Recurring windows also show a daily or weekly badge so you can tell at a glance how they repeat. Each row lists the first occurrence’s start and end times underneath.

Maintenance window vs. acknowledging an incident

These two actions look similar but do very different things — don’t reach for the wrong one:

	Maintenance window	Acknowledge an incident
Purpose	Planned work you know about ahead of time	Telling teammates “I’ve got this” on an active incident
Stops alerts?	Yes — suppresses alerts for selected monitors	No — alerts continue
Prevents incidents opening?	Yes, while active	No
When you set it	Before the work, covering a time range	After an incident has already opened

In short: if you want to prevent noise during planned work, schedule a maintenance window. If an incident is already open and you just want to signal that someone is handling it, acknowledge it instead.

Related

• Incidents — how incidents open, close, and get acknowledged.