Maintenance Windows

Schedule planned maintenance periods to prevent false alerts and control check behavior during downtime.

Monitoring as Code: Learn more about the Maintenance Window Construct.

Maintenance windows allow you to schedule planned downtime for your services, preventing false alerts and preserving accurate availability metrics during system updates, deployments, and infrastructure maintenance activities.

During a maintenance window you can independently control two behaviors:

• Pause check execution — scheduled check runs are skipped entirely.
• Silence alerts — checks keep running and collecting data, but alert channel notifications (email, Slack, etc.) are suppressed.

You can enable either behavior, both, or neither depending on what you need.

Manual and triggered check runs (e.g. via the API or the Checkly UI) always execute, even when check execution is paused. However, if alert silencing is enabled, alerts from these runs will still be suppressed.

Creating a maintenance window

Navigate to the Maintenance Windows page indicated by the wrench icon on the menu. Then click “create new” in the top right corner.

After giving your window an appropriate name, the core options you have are:

Setting a schedule

Set your preferred starting date and time for your maintenance window. Note that all times are in UTC.

Setting repeats

If your maintenance window repeats at a certain cadence, toggle the repeat option. Here you can set

1. The amount of repetitions.
2. The unit of repetition, i.e. Day, Week or Month.
3. The date on which the repetition cycle should end.

If you schedule a window on the 31st and add a monthly repeat cycle, your schedule will also activate on the 30th of the relevant months and the 28th or 29th of February depending on the leap year.

Check behavior

Each maintenance window lets you configure how checks behave during the maintenance period. Toggle the behaviors you need:

Pause check execution

When enabled, scheduled check runs are skipped for the duration of the window. You can scope which checks are paused:

• All checks — every check in the account is paused.
• Checks matching tags — only checks (and check groups) with matching tags are paused.

Silence alerts

When enabled, alert channel notifications are suppressed while checks continue to run and collect data. This is useful when you want to keep monitoring but avoid noisy alerts during expected degradation. You can scope which checks are silenced:

• All checks — alerts are silenced for every check in the account.
• Checks matching tags — only checks (and check groups) with matching tags have their alerts silenced.

If a check starts failing during the maintenance window and continues failing after the window ends, Checkly will not retroactively send an alert once the window is over — the alert is suppressed. Enable Firewatch on your home dashboard to surface checks that started failing during maintenance.

You can use different tag sets for pausing and silencing. For example, pause your api checks while silencing alerts for frontend checks that might be affected by the same deployment.

Adding checks via tags

You scope which checks are affected by adding tags to the pause or silence configuration. Any checks or check groups with matching tags will be included.

This way, any checks or check groups created after creating your maintenance window can still be made part of the window; no need to update the maintenance window configuration. Just set the correct tags.

Monitoring maintenance status

During an active maintenance window, the home dashboard shows:

• A banner at the top summarizing which behaviors are active (paused, silenced, or both).
• A Maintenance badge on each affected check row, with a tooltip showing the maintenance window name and whether the check is paused, silenced, or both.
• An Under maintenance filter in the status filter dropdown, allowing you to quickly find all checks currently affected by a maintenance window.