Scheduling maintenance windows
You can schedule a maintenance window to mute alert notifications for specific entities within a particular time window. This feature is useful when planned maintenance or load testing in parts of the monitored system is scheduled.
The affected entities to be muted are filtered by using a Dynamic Focus Query or based on an Application Perspective. During an active maintenance window, Instana doesn't send alert notifications for events, issues, or incidents that match the query or the Application Perspective. However, these events, issues, or incidents are still created and updated.
Creating or scheduling maintenance windows
The Schedule Maintenance Window wizard takes you through a series of steps to create or schedule maintenance windows. To access the wizard, complete the following steps:
- In the Instana UI, go to Settings > Maintenance Windows
- Click Schedule Maintenance Window.
The maintenance window creation wizard is displayed. To create a maintenance window, complete the following steps in the wizard:
To display all the steps in one page, click Switch to Advanced Mode.
The advanced mode view is the default view for editing a maintenance window.
Step 1: Schedule Window
In this step, select one of the following types of maintenance window that you want to create:
- One time
Creates only one specific maintenance window. For more information about creating a one-time maintenance window, see Set a one-time maintenance window. - Recurrent
Creates a set of maintenance windows that are repeated based on configured requirements. For example, create maintenance windows every 2 weeks for 6 months. For more information about creating recurrent windows, see Set recurrent maintenance windows.
Set a one-time maintenance window
To create a one-time maintenance window, complete the following steps:
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In the Recurrence section, select One time only.
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In the Timing section, enter the schedule for the maintenance window in the following fields:
- Start Time and Start Date
Determines when the maintenance window starts. - Duration
Specifies how long the maintenance window is active (in minutes, hours, or days). - All day
Schedules the maintenance window for 24 hours that begins at 12 midnight on the specified start date. If you enable this toggle, you don't need to configure the Start Time and the Duration.
- Start Time and Start Date
Set recurrent maintenance windows
To create a recurrent maintenance window, select from the following recurring frequency options in the Recurrence section. This specification describes how often maintenance windows recur within a particular schedule range.
- Daily: This option creates maintenance windows that recur daily. You must specify the days on which the window must be repeated, for example, every 2 days.
- Weekly: This option creates maintenance windows that recur weekly. For the specified weekly interval, you can define on which days the maintenance window occurs. Specify the weekdays in the particular week and the weekly interval on how often it must happen, for example, on Friday and Sunday every 3 weeks.
- Monthly: This option creates maintenance windows that recur monthly. For the specified monthly interval, for example, every 2 months, you can define on which day the maintenance window occurs in the following ways:
- Specify the month-day, for example, 21st of every second month.
- Specify the week-day, for example, the second Tuesday of every second month.
- Yearly: This option creates maintenance windows that recur on an annual basis. For the specified yearly interval, you can define on which day the maintenance window occurs in the following ways:
- Specify the month & day, for example, every year on 25 December.
- Specify the week-day of specific month, for example, every last Monday of September.
For all recurring frequency options, you must also specify a scheduling interval. In the Schedule Range section (right side of the wizard), you can select the start and end dates of the recurring maintenance window from the following options:
- Start From: The starting date of the recurrent maintenance window specification that is provided through the frequency options.
- Repeat Until: The ending of the recurrent maintenance window specification can be specified in one of the following ways:
- A date: The specific date on which the recurrent maintenance window specification ends.
- Number of occurrences: A total number of times the specification must recur.
- Forever: The specification never ends and keeps recurring.
In the Timing section, you can specify when and for how long each maintenance window is active by completing the following fields:
- Start Time and Start Date
Determines when the maintenance window starts. - Duration
Specifies for how long the maintenance window is active (in minutes, hours or days). - All day
Schedules the maintenance window for 24 hours that begins at 12 midnight on the specified start date. If you enable this toggle, you don't need to configure the Start Time and the Duration.
Step 2: Determine Scope
Apply a filter on the entities to be muted by selecting one of the following options:
- Application Perspective
- Selected entities (Dynamic Focus query)
- Synthetic Tests (beta)
- All available entities
On using Dynamic Focus Query, if the query field is left empty, all alerts are turned off during this maintenance window.
Step 3: Name + Preview
After you confirm the following items in this final step of scheduling the window, click Create.
- Name
Enter a name for the maintenance window configuration. - Preview
Lists a preview of the first four occurrences of the recurrent maintenance window specification.
The new configurations or changes to existing configurations can take up to 4 minutes to take effect.
You can also configure maintenance windows by using the Instana Backend REST API.
Viewing maintenance windows
To view the status of maintenance window configurations, go to Settings > Maintenance Windows. The Maintenance Window Configurations table with the status of each configuration is displayed.
Maintenance window states
The maintenance windows are grouped by the following states:
- Scheduled: The next occurrence of the maintenance configuration is scheduled in the future.
- Active: The maintenance configuration is active now.
- Paused: The current or next maintenance window occurrence is paused. Alerts for the events that match the scope of this maintenance configuration is not muted. If you resume, the status of the configuration changes to Active or Scheduled, depending on when the next occurrence happens.
- Expired: All the scheduled maintenance window occurrences for this configuration are finished.
- Unscheduled: The maintenance configuration does not specify a valid time configuration and can never be active in the future.
Pausing or resuming maintenance windows
Maintenance windows that are only Active and Scheduled can be paused or resumed by clicking the pause icon on the right side of the page.
On clicking the pause icon, the current or next maintenance window occurrences are paused until the configuration is resumed. On unpausing, the maintenance configuration is resumed and takes effect as scheduled.
