11. 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.

During a maintenance "with data collection" triggers are processed as usual and events are created when required. However, problem escalations are paused for hosts in maintenance, if the Pause operations while in maintenance option is checked in action configuration. In this case, escalation steps that may include sending notifications or remote commands will be ignored for as long as the maintenance period lasts.

For example, if escalation steps are scheduled at 0, 30 and 60 minutes after a problem start, and there is a half-hour long maintenance lasting from 10 minutes to 40 minutes after a real problem arises, steps two and three will be executed a half-hour later, or at 60 minutes and 90 minutes (providing the problem still exists). Similarly, if a problem arises during the maintenance, the escalation will start after the maintenance.

To receive problem notifications during the maintenance normally (without delay), you have to uncheck the Pause operations while in maintenance option in action configuration.

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.

If a timestamped value is sent for a host that is in a “no data” maintenance type (e.g. using Zabbix sender) then this value will be dropped however it is possible to send a timestamped value in for an expired maintenance period and it will be accepted.

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:

All mandatory input fields are marked with a red asterisk.

The Periods tab allows you to define the exact days and hours when the maintenance takes place. Clicking on New opens a flexible 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 two days or every two weeks and so on. The starting day or week is the day or week that Active since time falls on.

For example, having Active since set to 2013-09-06 12:00 and an hour long daily recurrent period every two days at 23:00 will result in the first maintenance period starting on 2013-09-06 at 23:00, while the second maintenance period will start on 2013-09-08 at 23:00. Or, with the same Active since time and an hour long daily recurrent period every two days at 01:00, the first maintenance period will start on 2013-09-08 at 01:00, and the second maintenance period on 2013-09-10 at 01:00.

The Hosts & Groups tab allows you to select the hosts and host groups for maintenance.

Specifying a parent host group implicitly selects all nested host groups. Thus the maintenance will also be executed on hosts from nested groups.

Display

An orange wrench icon next to the host name indicates that this host is in maintenance in the Monitoring → Dashboard, Monitoring → Triggers and Inventory → Hosts → Host inventory details sections.

Maintenance details are displayed when the mouse pointer is positioned over the icon.

Additionally, hosts in maintenance get an orange background in Monitoring → Maps and in Configuration → Hosts their status is displayed as 'In maintenance'.