This documentation supports an earlier version of BMC Helix Operations Management.

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Managing maintenance windows

A maintenance window is a time period that operators define in advance to perform maintenance activities in your infrastructure environment.


During maintenance time periods, you don't want to receive events indicating that your services are unavailable. As an administrator, configure blackout policies to suppress unwanted events or ignore events for a specific time period. If you define your scheduled maintenance windows correctly, the blacked out events are not included in the performance monitoring of your infrastructure environment.

Example scenario

Jane is an operator at Apex Global. Her job is to watch for any critical events in their environment that might need immediate attention.  It is imperative to Jane that she can quickly identify actionable events from all incoming events. Jane is aware of a maintenance window of about 2 hours for a couple of servers in their infrastructure. She does not want to keep receiving critical service-down events from the servers under maintenance. She requests Sarah, her manager to help her out. To deal with this situation, Sarah configures an event blackout policy that withholds events from the servers going under maintenance.

As an administrator, you can suppress a large number of event notifications in the following blackout policy usage scenarios:

  • Apply blackout policies to manage your maintenance window activities efficiently. A few examples of maintenance window activities are:

    • Application and package deployments

    • Software update deployments

    • OS patch deployments

  • Use blackout policies during the time periods when you are expecting abnormal operations, such as huge spike in operations during performance testing.

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