Maintenance Windows

A maintenance window tells GridNMS that a device is undergoing a planned change over a set time range. While a window is active, GridNMS still records every event the device raises — so you keep a full audit trail of what happened during the change — but it suppresses the alert notifications for those events. No one gets paged for a device you took down on purpose.

Getting paged during a planned change is one of the fastest ways to lose trust in a monitoring tool. Maintenance windows keep the signal honest without going dark.

What a window does

For any device inside an active window:

• Events are still recorded. They appear in the Events view, tagged with a Maintenance badge so it’s clear the notification was intentionally held.
• Notifications are suppressed. Email and endpoint (webhook / Slack / etc.) alerts for those events are not sent. This includes the per-event alert and any case-grouped alert that the event would otherwise have triggered.
• Everything else is unaffected. Metrics, topology, and log collection continue normally. Devices not in a window alert as usual.

The window only affects the device it’s scheduled on — other devices keep alerting even if they share a site or class.

Scheduling a window

There are two places to schedule one:

• Configure → Maintenance — the fleet-wide view. See every scheduled window across your devices, which ones are active right now, and schedule, edit, or cancel any of them. Click Schedule Window, pick the device, set a start and end time, and add an optional note (for example, “core switch firmware upgrade”).
• Device detail → Maintenance tab — the quick path for a single device. Opens the same form with the device already selected.

A window needs a start and an end time; the end must be after the start. When the current time is inside that range the window is Active; before it, Upcoming; after it, Past.

Seeing active windows

• The Configure → Maintenance page shows a status badge on every window and a count of how many are active now.
• The Dashboard has an Upcoming Maintenance panel for the next windows.
• In the Events view, any event raised during a window carries a Maintenance badge, and its detail panel notes that the notification was suppressed.

Good to know

• Scope (v1): windows are scheduled per device, as a single one-shot time range. Site-wide / class-wide windows and recurring schedules are planned follow-ups.
• Cancelling early: delete the window (trash icon) to end suppression immediately — any new events on that device alert again right away.
• Already-open events: suppression applies to events raised during the window. An event that opened before the window began keeps whatever notification state it already had.