Managing scheduled maintenance events

Your system will occasionally undergo planned outages. In FireHydrant, you can keep track of these outages in the scheduled maintenances section.

Creating a new scheduled maintenance

To create a scheduled maintenance:

1. In the left nav, go to Incident response > Scheduled maintenances.
2. Click + Create schedule. 
3. Provide as much detail as possible about the maintenance and click Schedule.

Note: The Attach to status pages dropdown enables you to attach your newly created maintenance schedule to a status page. This causes the schedule to appear on the status page; subscribers to the page will be notified of the scheduled maintenance.

Editing a Scheduled Maintenance

To change a maintenance schedule, select a previously scheduled maintenance by clicking its name in the list of scheduled maintenances. Update details as necessary.

If there are one or more status pages attached to the scheduled maintenance, your changes will be reflected throughout FireHydrant.

Canceling a Scheduled Maintenance

To cancel a scheduled maintenance, click the name of the maintenance schedule. On the edit page for the schedule, click Delete permanently.

What happens when a scheduled maintenance starts?

When the start time for a scheduled maintenance occurs, FireHydrant automatically creates an incident for you. 

• FireHydrant creates the incident with all of the impacts that you configured in the scheduled maintenance.
• If something goes wrong with your scheduled maintenance and you need to escalate it to an unplanned outage, you must also change the severity of the automatically created incident.
• If there are status pages attached to the scheduled maintenance, they will be automatically connected to the incident.
• Scheduled maintenance incidents do not currently automatically resolve, you must resolve the maintenance incident manually. 

Best practices for scheduled maintenance

We recommend treating scheduled maintenance in a similar way you would treat an incident. For example, we suggest creating a Runbook specifically for maintenance events. That Runbook might bring your team into the maintenance incident channel to monitor the state of things during the maintenance window so that they're ready to take action if things go awry, at which point an active incident could be declared.

Throughout the maintenance window, the maintenance incident channel can be used to record notes on how the maintenance activity is progressing. Someone from the team will also need to confirm the maintenance is complete, and then resolve the incident manually, as scheduled maintenance windows are not currently automatically resolved based on the scheduled completion time.

Integration with FireHydrant Status Pages

FireHydrant status pages will display any currently ongoing or future scheduled maintenances. This way, anyone viewing a status page will know what to expect.

All subscribers (email or RSS) of a status page will receive a notification in one of the following scenarios:

• A scheduled maintenance has a status page attached to it.
• The scheduled maintenance will start in 24 hours.
• The scheduled maintenance is canceled within 24 hours of starting.