What is Maintenance Mode?
Maintenance Mode is a way to control what happens with monitoring for a computer during a certain time window.
Do you still want scripts to run but not get tickets? Maybe you want tickets but not scripts to run? Maybe you do not want either?
A good use case example is a small remote office, maybe this office runs off an unreliable power grid, so they shut down the server each night. Rather than getting alerted that the server is offline every night, you can use Maintenance Mode to have the server not report as offline in your Offline Server Monitor during the hours of 6 pm and 8 am.
When NOT to use Maintenance Mode:
- Getting repeated low drive space alerts about a server or workstation? Sure, setting Maintenance Mode would stop them, but it would also stop other critical monitoring and alerting from taking place on that system.
- Default windows for every location used to be a common practice in Automate, it is no longer needed and should be removed from the location Default & Deployment tab.
- Onboarding a new client and do not want monitoring or patching? Use the service plan ignite EDFs at the location level to control new client monitoring.
Maintenance Mode Best Practices!
- Set a realistic duration time! – Often times techs setting Maintenance Mode will enter an unnecessarily long duration time. Often 60 minutes would be enough to cover a troubleshooting timeframe.
- At the location or group level, Maintenance Mode duration can be set to repeat on days of the week or every day for a certain window.
- Enter a reason! – Add a ticket number or technician info, it helps understand why a system was added.
- Use them with patching! – The reboot policy in Patch Manager can have a Maintenance window set for each reboot, this will help with false alarms for servers offline due to patching.
- Schedule an audit! – ProVal has dataview audits available for seeing all the Maintenance Modes set in your environment. It would be best to audit them once a quarter and remove un-needed or incorrectly set windows.
Written by: Chris Mitchell - Sr. MSP Consultant