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Maintenance & Silences

Maintenance windows and silences prevent expected or non‑actionable alerts from distracting operators during planned work or known noisy periods.

Use this guide to learn how to reduce alert noise during planned work while keeping maintenance windows and silences controlled, traceable, and auditable.

Maintenance Windows​

Use maintenance windows when you expect changes to generate alerts, such as:

  • Deployments and patching waves.
  • Planned infrastructure changes (for example, migrations, scaling operations).
  • Load or resilience tests.

During a maintenance window:

  • Alerts may be suppressed, downgraded in severity, or routed differently.
  • Events are still recorded for audit, but they may not wake up on‑call engineers.

Coordinate maintenance windows with Patch Management and change‑management processes where applicable.

Silences​

Silences are typically shorter‑lived and more targeted than maintenance windows. Use them to:

  • Temporarily mute known‑noisy alerts while you tune thresholds or fix root causes.
  • Stop duplicate alerts when an upstream problem is already being handled.

Silences should always have:

  • A clear owner.
  • An expiration time.
  • A reason or ticket reference.

Governance​

  • Review active silences and maintenance windows regularly to avoid “set and forget” suppression.
  • Require change records or approvals for long‑running, wide‑scope maintenance windows.
  • Include silences and maintenance windows in post‑incident reviews where they affected detection or response.