Maintenance Windows
Schedule planned work so checks and incidents in the affected projects stay quiet instead of paging your team.
Maintenance windows tell Ionhour "we're doing planned work, don't alert us." Schedule one with a name, a start and end time, and the projects it covers, and Ionhour automatically keeps things quiet while the work is happening — no manual muting, no forgetting to turn alerts back on afterward.
What a Maintenance Window Does
While a window is active, checks and incidents in the covered projects are suppressed — your team doesn't get paged for a planned restart, deployment, or database migration. Everything else keeps monitoring normally; only the projects you pick are affected.
Ionhour moves each window through its lifecycle automatically based on the times you set:
- Scheduled — created, but the start time hasn't arrived yet. Nothing is suppressed.
- Active — the current time is inside the window. Suppression is in effect for the covered projects.
- Completed — the end time has passed. Normal alerting resumes.
- Cancelled — you cancelled it before it started. It never runs.
Nothing to remember to turn back on
You don't need to manually re-enable alerting when maintenance is done. As soon as the end time passes, Ionhour resumes monitoring and alerting for the covered projects on its own.
Scheduling a Maintenance Window
Open Maintenance
Go to Incidents > Maintenance in the side menu.
Start a new window
Click Schedule Maintenance.
Give it a name
Enter a short, descriptive name — something like "Database migration" so anyone glancing at the calendar or the incident list knows what's happening.
Set the start and end time
Pick the Start and End date and time. The end must be after the start — Ionhour will flag it if it isn't.
Choose which projects it covers
Select one or more projects from the list. Leave it empty to cover all projects in the workspace.
Save it
Click Schedule. The window appears immediately as Scheduled and will switch to Active on its own once the start time arrives.
If you haven't scheduled any maintenance yet, the Maintenance page shows a short walkthrough of what the feature does with a quick-start form built right in, so you can schedule your first window without opening a separate dialog.
List and Calendar Views
Every maintenance window you've scheduled shows up in two views, toggled from the top of the page:
A sortable table of every window. Each row shows the name, status, affected projects, the window's start/end times, and its duration.
- Filter by status using the tabs — All, Active, Upcoming, Past.
- Search by name to find a specific window quickly.
- Filter by project to see only windows covering a specific project.
- Sort by clicking the Name, Status, or Window column headers.
When one or more windows are currently active, a small banner above the table calls them out so you never miss that something is suppressed right now.
A visual day-by-day grid — switch between Month and Week. Each window appears as a colored block on the days it spans, color-coded by project so overlapping maintenance is easy to spot. Click any block to open its details.
Window Details
Click a row in the list, or a block on the calendar, to open the details panel. It shows:
- The start and end time, and (if the window was set up to repeat) its recurrence and timezone.
- The projects it covers — or All projects if none were selected.
- Who created it.
- Whether alerts and incidents are being suppressed, and whether it's set to auto-publish to your status page.
If something still goes wrong during an active window, it isn't hidden forever — it's recorded and linked back to the maintenance window so you can review it afterward and confirm everything recovered cleanly.
Managing a Window
From the row menu (or the details panel) you can:
- Edit — change the name, times, or covered projects.
- End early — available while a window is Active. This stops suppression immediately; monitoring resumes right away, and if something is still failing, alerts fire again.
- Cancel — available while a window is still Scheduled (hasn't started yet). It's marked Cancelled and never runs.
- Delete permanently — available for a window that's already Cancelled, if you want to remove it from the list entirely. This can't be undone.
Cancel, don't delete, once maintenance is underway
Once a window has started you can't delete it — use End early instead so the history stays visible for later review. Deleting is only offered for windows that were cancelled before they started.
Maintenance Windows vs. Deployments
Ionhour has two related features for planned downtime, and it's easy to reach for the wrong one:
| Maintenance Windows | Deployments | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | One or more projects | One or more checks within a project |
| Best for | Infrastructure work — migrations, upgrades, provider maintenance | Tracking an application release |
| Effect | Suppresses alerts and incidents for the covered projects | Pauses and resumes the checks tied to the release |
If you're taking down a whole service or project for planned work, use a maintenance window. If you're releasing a new version and just want the checks tied to it paused for the rollout, use a deployment instead.
Best Practices
- Be specific about which projects you pick. A window with no projects selected covers everything in the workspace — make sure that's actually what you want.
- Schedule ahead of time. Creating the window as soon as you know about the maintenance gives your team visibility into upcoming quiet periods.
- End early instead of waiting it out. If the work finishes ahead of schedule, end the window early so monitoring resumes immediately.
- Cancel plans that fall through. If maintenance gets called off before it starts, cancel the window rather than leaving it scheduled.
- Check back afterward. After a window completes, skim the incident list for anything that was suppressed during it — if something broke and didn't recover, you'll want to follow up.