Maintenance windows: how suppression works
Maintenance windows suppress incidents and alerts for monitors attached to a status page. Learn how the status page link controls what gets suppressed, and how to set up maintenance for monitors you keep private.
Maintenance windows let you schedule planned downtime and stop Pingara from paging you for it. The one thing to know before you set one up: a maintenance window suppresses monitors through a status page, not directly. If a monitor isn't attached to any status page, no maintenance window can ever suppress it — the checks still run, but incidents and alerts fire exactly as they would on any other day.
Pro plan required. Maintenance windows are a Pro feature. Free-plan organizations can't create or edit them.
Why suppression is status-page-scoped
You create and configure maintenance windows from a status page, and the monitors you can select are only the monitors already attached to that page. This isn't a UI limitation you can work around elsewhere — it's how suppression is evaluated. When a check comes back down or degraded, Pingara looks up every status page the monitor is attached to, then checks each one for an in-progress maintenance window covering the current time. A monitor with no status page attachment has nothing to look up, so it's never covered.
This is deliberate: maintenance windows exist to keep a status page's public incident feed clean during planned work, and the mechanism follows that design end to end.
Setting up suppression for a monitor
- Attach the monitor to a status page. If you don't already publish this monitor externally, create a status page and leave Public off — see Creating Status Pages. A private status page still supports maintenance windows; it just isn't reachable at a public URL.
- Create the maintenance window on that status page, and either select the specific monitors it should cover, or choose All monitors on this status page to cover everything currently attached — new monitors you add to the page later are covered automatically too, since coverage is resolved live against the page's current monitor list, not a snapshot taken when the window was created.
- Choose what the window suppresses. These are two independent toggles, not one:
| Toggle | What it does | What still happens |
|---|---|---|
| Suppress incidents | No incident is opened for a down or degraded transition during the window | Checks keep running and check results are still recorded |
| Suppress alerts | No notification is sent for incident creation or recovery during the window | If an incident is still created (suppress incidents off), it's just silent |
You can suppress alerts without suppressing incidents — useful when you want the incident history and duration recorded for later review, just without paging anyone. You can also suppress incidents without suppressing alerts, though in practice there's nothing left to alert on if no incident opens.
Multiple status pages
If a monitor is attached to more than one status page, an in-progress maintenance window on any of those pages that covers the monitor is enough to suppress it — you don't need a window on every page it's on.
What doesn't change during a window
Maintenance windows don't pause monitoring. Checks run on schedule, check results are stored, and your uptime and Apdex history for the window's duration reflects whatever the checks actually returned — only incident creation and alert delivery are affected, and only for the toggles you enabled. If you want checks to stop entirely, pause the monitor instead (see Understanding the Dashboard); pausing and a maintenance window are different tools for different situations.
Next Steps
- Creating Status Pages — Attach a monitor to a status page before scheduling a window
- Understanding Incidents — How incidents behave outside a maintenance window
- Setting Up Alerts — Configure the alert policies a maintenance window temporarily silences