A planned outage (also called a maintenance window) is a scheduled time period during which incident detection is suppressed for selected monitors. This prevents false alerts during intentional downtime.
Why Use Planned Outages
When you take an endpoint offline for maintenance, a deploy, or a database migration, PulseAPI checks will fail and your alert rules will fire — creating false incidents and waking up your team for something you already know about.
Planned outages suppress incident creation and alert notifications for the affected monitors during the window. PulseAPI continues running checks and recording results, but failed checks during the window don't create incidents.
What Gets Suppressed
During an active planned outage window:
- Failed checks do not create incidents
- No notifications are sent for the affected monitors
- Check results are still recorded in check history
After the window ends, normal incident detection resumes immediately. If checks are still failing after the window, incidents will be created.
Planned Outages vs. Pausing a Monitor
|
Planned Outage |
Pause Monitor |
| Checks still run |
Yes |
No |
| Check history recorded |
Yes |
No |
| Auto-resumes |
Yes (at scheduled end time) |
No (manual resume required) |
| Best for |
Known maintenance window |
Open-ended downtime |
Use planned outages for maintenance with a defined end time. Use pausing for indefinite downtime.
Recurring Maintenance
You can create recurring maintenance windows (daily, weekly, monthly) for regular scheduled tasks like database backups, nightly jobs, or weekly deployments.
See Setting Up Recurring Maintenance Windows.
Related Articles
Still have questions? Contact support.
Related Articles
Creating a Maintenance Window
This article explains how to schedule a one-time planned outage to suppress alerts during a maintenance period. Prerequisites: You must be a team Owner, Admin, or Member to create maintenance windows. Steps In the left sidebar, click Maintenance. ...
Setting Up Recurring Maintenance Windows
If you have a regularly scheduled maintenance task — a nightly job, a weekly deploy, a monthly database backup — you can create a recurring maintenance window instead of scheduling each one manually. Steps In the left sidebar, click Maintenance. ...
Editing and Canceling a Maintenance Window
This article explains how to update an upcoming maintenance window's timing or affected monitors, and how to cancel one. Editing an Upcoming Window In the left sidebar, click Maintenance. Find the window you want to edit in the list. It must have ...
Pausing and Resuming a Monitor
Pausing a monitor temporarily stops PulseAPI from checking it. No checks run, no incidents are created, and no alerts are sent while a monitor is paused. When to Pause Instead of Delete Pause a monitor when the downtime is intentional and temporary: ...
Team Roles and Permissions
PulseAPI uses four roles to control what team members can see and do. This article describes each role and provides a full permission matrix. The Four Roles Owner The team creator and ultimate authority. There is exactly one Owner per team. Owners ...