A maintenance plan dictates which alerts will be silenced during scheduled system maintenance. An alert that contains select conditions and occurs within the maintenance time window will be marked for maintenance. Alerts marked for maintenance can still be correlated into an incident if they match the incident's correlation criteria.

An incident's Status and Last Changed timestamps are determined by the presence of active alerts in the incident. For example, if one alert within an incident is marked as Warning and another is Critical but is also marked for maintenance, the critical alert is silenced for the maintenance period. The incident is classified as Active and the status is Warning.

Alerts that begin before the maintenance plan window are marked for maintenance only when their updates come in within the maintenance window. Marked alerts remain silenced even after the time window ends unless they are updated after the maintenance time window and are classified as Active again. If an alert is resolved, it will reside in the Resolved folder.

Incidents comprised exclusively of alerts that are marked for maintenance can be found in the Maintenance folder in the left pane. If an incident has at least one alert that is not marked for maintenance, it will reside in the folder relevant to the incident's Active alerts.

🚧

Alert Level

Maintenance plans function on the alert level. Incidents marked for Maintenance remain in the Maintenance folder only if all alerts in the incident were received and last updated within the maintenance window.

Relevant Permissions

Roles with the following permissions can access the Maintenance Plans section, the Plans V1 API and the Maintenance Plans V2 API:

To learn more about how BigPanda's permissions work, see the Roles Management guide.

Example Maintenance Flows

If a maintenance plan starts at 2 AM and ends at 3 AM:

For an incident that contains only alerts that match the maintenance plan rules:

• If the incident starts at 1:30 AM, it will not enter the Maintenance folder.
• If the incident starts at 2:30 AM, the incident will be flagged for maintenance and be moved to the Maintenance folder. The incident will remain in the Maintenance folder even after 3 AM. After 3 AM, if a new alert enters the incident or an existing alert is updated, the incident will be moved out of the Maintenance folder even if it matches the plan rules.

For an incident that will be correlated with 2 alerts - A) An alert that matches, B) An alert that does not:

• If the incident starts at 1:30 AM, it will not enter the Maintenance folder.
• If the incident starts at 2:30 AM, with only alert A, it will be moved into the Maintenance folder. When alert B is correlated to the incident, the maintenance flag will be removed from the incident and the incident will be moved to the Active folder.
• If the incident starts at 2:30 AM, with only alert B, it will not be moved into the Maintenance folder when alert A is correlated.

👍

Learn More

To learn how to completely suppress alerts during maintenance, check out Manage Alert Filtering

Plans that have been suppressed will not be visible in the BigPanda console.

🚧

Plan Limit

Each organization can only have 3,500 maintenance plans at a time.

🚧

Condition Limitations

Maintenance plan conditions cannot be longer than 25,000 characters long.

All alert tags in maintenance plan conditions must be listed in lowercase, regardless of the tag's system case.

Create a Maintenance Plan

1. In the BigPanda console, click Settings and choose Planned Maintenance.
2. In the resulting Planned Maintenance section, click the New Plan button or click Add a New Plan under the Search bar.
3. In the resulting Create a New Plan popup, enter a title for your plan and the condition you wish to filter. These Condition fields cannot handle custom tags.

Clicking in the Condition field opens the Query Assist, which helps you build the query to filter conditions.

Maintenance plan conditions cannot be longer than 80,000 characters long.

🚧

Reserved Words

BPQL does not support the use of BigPanda reserved words such as description or primary_property.

4. Enter the Time Window in which the plan will run.

5. (Optional) Add any additional details you wish to include in the Add Description field.
6. Click Create Plan.

• Your plan is now listed in the Planned Maintenance section.
• Your plan now marks relevant alerts in your Alerts tab for maintenance.

View Maintenance Plans

Maintenance plans have three possible statuses:

In Progress - Plan is in progress. When a plan is running, you can stop, duplicate, or extend the plan. Stopping an In Progress plan updates the End Time to the time when the plan was stopped.

Planned - A plan has been created to run in the future. While in Planned status, the plan can be edited, deleted, or duplicated.

Done - Plan has finished running. Once the plan is done, you can no longer edit it, but you can still duplicate or delete it.

A selected plan's specifications are displayed to the right of the Planned Maintenance list:

• The name of the plan
• Status - Planned/In Progress/Done
• Maintenance Key
• Condition - The query to be marked for maintenance
• Time Window - Start and end time of the plan
• Stop (option only available for In Progress plans)
• Edit the plan (option only available for Planned plans)
• Description (Optional)
• Created by - User, time, and date
• Most recent change - User, time, and date

Manage Maintenance Plans

You can edit, duplicate, or permanently delete each maintenance plan you created. You can also filter the list of maintenance plans by entering a search term in the field above the list.

To manage maintenance plans:

1. Navigate to Settings > Planned Maintenance. A list of existing maintenance plans appears.
2. Select the maintenance plan you wish to edit, duplicate, or delete.
3. Use any of the following options to modify the maintenance plan:

You can use the Maintenance Plans V2 API to further customize your Maintenance Plans.

👍

Learn More

To learn how to completely suppress alerts during maintenance, check out Maintenance Plans V1.
Please note that plans that have been suppressed will not be visible in the BigPanda console.

Next Steps

Learn to navigate the BigPanda Settings page

Learn to use the Maintenance Plans V2 API

Learn to use the Plans V1 Event Filtering