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Maintenance Windows

Patrick Bakker
Change Calendar

A maintenance window is a recurring period of time designated in advance, during which preventive maintenance that could cause disruption of a service may be performed. It is now possible to define such maintenance windows and relate them to specific service instances.

A new Maintenance window field has been added to the Service Instance form. In it, a calendar can be selected in which the desired maintenance window is defined.

maintenance window

Any workflow implementation tasks that have an impact then display a warning banner at the top of the task record if the task falls outside of the maintenance window. This helps users, change managers, and service owners to immediately identify that a task should not be planned in or worked on outside of that maintenance window. Time zone effects are of course also taken into account.

Maintenance window gantt

Maintenance window conflicts within the Gantt chart view within a workflow are also visualized. Implementation tasks that have an impact and that fall outside of the maintenance window display a small warning indicator next to the task’s time bar. Hovering over this icon displays a tool tip with the relevant message. A similar warning is also shown in the Change Calendar.

To be clear: only a warning is shown. It is not made impossible for users to start working on a task that conflicts with a maintenance window.

By adding a holiday in the ‘Holidays’ section of the Settings console and linking that to the Maintenance Window calendar, it is even possible to define freeze periods (or ‘blackout’ periods). In the example below, a Christmas Freeze Period for the week around Christmas was configured and added to the maintenance window.

Freeze period

In a freeze period, implementation tasks with an impact should not be executed, even if they fall into a maintenance window. If a task is planned in a freeze period, it will also display the warning.