Table of Contents
9. Maintenance
Overview
You can define maintenance periods for hosts and host groups in Zabbix. There are two maintenance types - with data collection and with no data collection.
To skip receiving notifications during host maintenance, actions should be configured by retaining the default action condition 'Maintenance status = not in "maintenance"' - then you should not get problem notifications during maintenance. If a problem happens during the maintenance and is not resolved, a notification is generated after the maintenance period ends.
To receive a notification for unresolved problems during the maintenance you have to remove the default action condition about not taking actions during maintenance.
If at least one host (used in the trigger expression) is not in maintenance mode, Zabbix will send a problem notification.
Zabbix server must be running during maintenance. Timer processes are responsible for switching host status to/from maintenance at 0 seconds of every minute. A proxy will always collect data regardless of the maintenance type (including "no data" maintenance). The data is later ignored by the server if 'no data collection' is set.
When "no data" maintenance ends, triggers using nodata() function will not fire before the next check during the period they are checking.
If a log item is added while a host is in maintenance and the maintenance ends, only new logfile entries since the end of the maintenance will be gathered.
To ensure predictable behaviour of recurring maintenance periods (daily, weekly, monthly), it is required to use a common timezone for all parts of Zabbix.
Configuration
To configure a maintenance period:
- Go to: Configuration → Maintenance
- Click on Create maintenance period (or on the name of an existing maintenance period)
The Maintenance tab contains general maintenance period attributes:
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | Name of the maintenance period. |
| Maintenance type | Two types of maintenance can be set: With data collection - data will be collected by the server during maintenance No data collection - data will not be collected by the server during maintenance |
| Active since | The date and time when executing maintenance periods becomes active. Note: Setting this time alone does not activate a maintenance period; for that go to the Periods tab. |
| Active till | The date and time when executing maintenance periods stops being active. |
| Description | Description of maintenance period. |
The Periods tab allows you to define the exact days and hours when the maintenance takes place. Clicking on New will give you a flexible New maintenance period form where you can define the times - for daily, weekly, monthly or one-time maintenance.
Daily and weekly periods have an Every day/Every week parameter, which defaults to 1. Setting it to 2 would make the maintenance take place every second day or every second week and so on. The starting day or week depends on the Active since time and a maintenance period will start the second day/second week after the day/week of Active since time.
For example, having Active since set to 2013-09-06 12:00 and an hour long daily recurrent period every 2nd day at 01:00 will result in the first maintenance period starting on 2013-09-07 at 01:00, while the second maintenance period will start on 2013-09-09 at 01:00. Or, with the same Active since time and an hour long daily recurrent period every 2nd day at 23:00, the first maintenance period will start on 2013-09-07 at 23:00, and the second maintenance period on 2013-09-09 at 23:00.
The Hosts & Groups tab allows you to select the hosts and host groups for maintenance.
Display
Hosts in maintenance are displayed accordingly in:
- Monitoring → Dashboard and Monitoring → Triggers - a round orange icon with a white wrench (since Zabbix 2.0.3 version) indicates that the host is in maintenance. Maintenance details are displayed when the mouse pointer is positioned over the icon. (Previously, before Zabbix 2.0.3, in the dashboard the names of hosts in maintenance were displayed in orange and, in Monitoring → Triggers, with an orange string displayed next to host name indicating the maintenance type.)
The display of hosts in maintenance in Dashboard can be unset altogether with the dashboard filtering function.
- in the host list - the Status column displays 'In maintenance'
- in network maps - hosts in maintenance have orange background