Incidents and Maintenance
Observer Lite tracks outages as incidents and supports maintenance windows to suppress expected alert noise.
Incident Lifecycle
An incident starts when a monitor has enough consecutive failures to reach its retry threshold.
Example:
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Check interval | 60 seconds |
| Retry count | 3 |
If the monitor fails three checks in a row, Observer Lite opens an incident and sends a down notification.
The incident closes when a later check succeeds.
Incident Fields
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Monitor | Monitor that failed. |
| Started at | Time the incident opened. |
| Resolved at | Time the monitor recovered. |
| Duration | Downtime length in seconds. |
| Root cause | Error message captured from the failed check. |
| Acknowledged by | User who acknowledged the incident, when applicable. |
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement records that a human has seen the incident. It does not close the incident.
Use acknowledgement for:
- Handoffs between responders
- Reducing duplicate investigation
- Recording that the outage is known
Maintenance Windows
Maintenance windows describe planned downtime.
Fields:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | Human-readable reason, such as Database upgrade. |
| Starts at | Beginning of the maintenance period. |
| Ends at | End of the maintenance period. |
| Repeat cron | Optional cron expression for repeating windows. |
| Suppress alerts | Whether matching checks should suppress notifications. |
| Monitor IDs | Monitors affected by the window. |
Creating a Window
- Open Maintenance.
- Create a new window.
- Choose start and end times.
- Select affected monitors.
- Enable alert suppression if the downtime is expected.
How Checks Behave During Maintenance
When a monitor is inside an active maintenance window with suppression enabled, scheduled checks are skipped for alerting purposes. This prevents planned downtime from opening noisy incidents.
Suggested Practices
- Give maintenance windows descriptive names.
- Keep windows as short as practical.
- Use monitor groups to make selection easier.
- Create windows before deploying risky infrastructure changes.
- Review old windows periodically.
What Maintenance Does Not Do
Maintenance windows do not pause the whole application.
They do not:
- Stop the web UI
- Disable user login
- Delete check history
- Change monitor configuration
- Silence unrelated monitors