Service level maintenance windows

By default, service level objective (SLO) calculations include every time period, which can factor planned maintenance or non-operational hours into your compliance score. This penalizes your reliability metrics during expected outages and makes it difficult to focus on genuine service issues.

Maintenance windows solve this problem by allowing you to exclude specific planned downtime periods from your SLO compliance and error budget calculations. You can schedule one-time or recurring maintenance windows, so your performance metrics accurately reflect only operational periods without manual adjustments.

What you can do with maintenance windows

Maintenance windows let you define and schedule planned downtime exclusions for your service levels. You can use maintenance windows to:

• Exclude planned maintenance: Schedule specific time periods when there are plans for maintenance, upgrades, or system changes so that they won't impact your SLO compliance and error budget calculations.
• Schedule one-time or recurring windows: Create one-time maintenance windows for specific events or set up recurring schedules (daily, weekly, monthly) for regular maintenance periods.
• Apply to multiple service levels: Use the same maintenance window across multiple service levels within the same account to manage exclusions efficiently.
• Track maintenance history: View all scheduled, active, and inactive maintenance windows with detailed information about their impact on your service levels.
• Visualize maintenance periods: See maintenance windows displayed directly on your service level charts as gray bars, making it easy to understand when exclusions are active.

Use cases

Here are some use cases in which you might use maintenance windows:

• Scheduled system upgrades: Exclude monthly system upgrade windows (for example, every third Sunday from 2:00 AM to 6:00 AM) from SLO calculations to avoid unfair penalization during necessary maintenance.
• Non-operational hours: Exclude nights and weekends for services that only operate during business hours (for example, daily from 6:00 PM to 8:00 AM and all day Saturday-Sunday).
• Planned deployments: Exclude one-time deployment windows when you're rolling out new features or making infrastructure changes.
• Chaos testing: Exclude periods when you're running chaos engineering experiments to test system resilience.

Limitations

When you use maintenance windows, keep these limitations in mind:

• Account scope: All service levels in a maintenance window must belong to the same account. You can't apply a single maintenance window across multiple accounts.
• Recurring frequency options: Recurring maintenance windows are limited to daily, weekly, and monthly frequencies. You can't create custom recurring patterns (such as every two weeks).

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