Manage Planned Maintenance

Maintenance plans reduce unnecessary noise by marking and silencing alerts triggered by system maintenance.

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.

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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.

Maintenance Plans Screen

Maintenance Plans Screen

Relevant Permissions

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

Role NameDescription
Plans_ReadRead-only - view the Maintenance Plans section, the Plans V1 API and the Maintenance Plans V2 API.
Plans_Full_AccessFull access - view and interact with the Maintenance Plans section and use the Plans V1 API and the Maintenance Plans V2 API to configure maintenance plans. Use the Schedules API to define the specific start and end times of Plans configured with the Plans V1 API.
Use these Read and Full permissions for both the Maintenance Plans V1 and the Maintenance Plans V2.

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.

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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.

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Plan Limit

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

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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.
Create a New Plan popup

Create a New Plan popup

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.

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Reserved Words

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

  1. Enter the Time Window in which the plan will run.
Time Window Settings

Time Window Settings

  1. (Optional) Add any additional details you wish to include in the Add Description field.
  2. 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.
In this case, the incident is classified as Active because at least one alert is active.

In this case, the incident is classified as Active because at least one alert is active.

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.

The plan is currently running.

The plan is currently running.

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

A plan has been scheduled.

A plan has been scheduled.

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

The plan has ended.

The plan has ended.

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
Plan Specs

Plan Specs

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:
OptionDescription
EditAny maintenance plan that is In Progress or Planned can be edited. Maintenance plans with the status Done can no longer be edited.

a. Click the Pencil icon on the incident tag ribbon, or the Edit Plan button in the incident tag details pane.
b. The Edit Plan window opens, allowing you to make changes to the maintenance plan.
c. When satisfied with the settings, click Update Plan to save.
DuplicateDuplicate a maintenance plan to use a previously created plan as a template.

a. Click the Duplicate Plan icon.
b. Adjust the maintenance plan as necessary to fit the new properties.
c. Click Duplicate Plan when you are happy with the changes to save.
DeleteDelete a maintenance plan when you are sure that it no longer applies to your infrastructure or process. A deleted maintenance plan cannot be recovered.

a. Click the Trash icon.
b. Click Delete to confirm, or Cancel to return to the previous page.

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

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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