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Don’t want to be alerted when your servers, websites, or web services are undergoing maintenance? Only want particular operators to be alerted and only during certain conditions?

In this lesson, you will learn how to make your wildest alerting dreams come true with maintenance windows and escalations.

Setting up maintenance windows

Let’s say you have a consistent time in which your team performs routine maintenance on your website, server, or web service. During that time, availability and performance may be out of the ordinary, and this may trigger alerts. What are you to do to avoid alert spam?

By setting up a maintenance window, you can set up the specific dates and times ahead of time, and determine whether you would like to disable your alerts (or your monitors) temporarily.

Setting up a Maintenance Window

How to create a maintenance window

You create maintenance schedules on a per-monitor basis. To schedule your planned maintenance:

  1. Click Monitors on the main menu and select Monitors from the list.
  2. Click to select and open the monitor settings for the monitor undergoing maintenance.
  3. Click on the tab labeled Maintenance Windows.
  4. Click the Add New Maintenance Window button.
  5. Set the Recurrence (once, daily, weekly, monthly).
  6. Set the From and Until dates and times (These options change based on your Recurrence choice in the previous step).
  7. Choose between disabling just the notifications or disabling the monitor completely from the Maintenance Type box.
  8. Click the Set button.
  9. Click the Save button to save the changes you just made to the monitor settings.

Note: If you set up a daily maintenance window and that window spans two days, you will need to set up two maintenance windows. For example, a maintenance window that starts at say 9:00 PM and continues to 3:00 AM, you need to set up two maintenance windows. One maintenance window for 9:00 PM to 12:00 AM and another for 12:00 AM to 3:00 AM.

Configuring escalation levels

At Uptrends, we love team players. That’s why we’ve built our alerting system with teams in mind with customizable escalation levels that help you make sure that the right people are alerted about a potential issue, at the right time.

You can configure up to three escalation levels, and generate alerts based on your own rules. They are super flexible and include:

  • Generating an alert when errors occur for a specific period of time or when a specific number of errors have occurred,
  • Set rules for sending only a certain number of alerts within a time period,
  • Set alert methods,
  • Add a custom message (for Slack, PagerDuty, and email notifications only).
  • Include a traceroute log in emails.
  • Add an extra email to alert additional people.
  • Select which operators or operator groups get the alert.

How to set an alert escalation

Within each Alert Definition, you have one to three escalation levels. To set up your escalations, open your alert definitions and select an alert definition to modify (see the previous lesson, Creating Alert Definitions, if you don't know how to access or create definitions).

  1. Click to select an alert definition or click the Add Alert Definition button to create a new definition.
  2. Select the Escalation Level 1 tab.
  3. Select the Active check box if not already selected.
  4. Set the rules for the Escalation.
  5. Select the frequency of the reminders. Learn more in the KB article Alert reminders.
  6. Select Alerting by E-mail or SMS/Text (SMS/Text uses message credits).
  7. Select the Alerting by integrations option (if you have integrations set up; otherwise, visit the Knowledge Base Alerting for more information on integrations and set up. Integrations include, phone (uses message credits) and integrations like PagerDuty, Slack, and StatusHub).
  8. Add a custom message (optional and only applies to email, Slack, and PagerDuty notifications).
  9. Select the Traceroute check box to receive a traceroute log with the emails.
  10. Use the Groups and operators section to select the operators for the escalation (remember alerts go out only if the designated operator is on-duty)
  11. Click the Save button when you are finished configuring your levels.

Continue adding Escalation levels. 

Once you have set up your Escalation levels and added the integrations you want to use, you can test if messages are sent. Check out the KB article Testing alert messages for the methods available for different integrations.

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