Maintenance Windows and Production States in Zenoss

This post will be a bit more informative than I have tried before, but its an issue we have addressed recently on the mailing lists and we will be rolling this information into the docs so I thought it may help some users in this forum too.
Zenoss has the capability to support “Maintenance Windows” or time periods (either scheduled or on the fly) where the monitoring and alerting rules are changed. A set of rules governing monitoring, display and alerting can be collectively defined as “Production States”. When there are temporary changes in Production State, and then a reversion to the original state, this is a Maintenance Window.

Production States

There are three factors that affect and define the Production State for devices:

1. Whether or not the device is being monitored.
2. Whether or not you want alerting to occur.
3. Whether or not the device appears on the dashboard.

The available Production States are merely combinations of the above:

• Production - you want all three: monitoring, alerting and dashboard.

• Pre-production - you may want monitoring but not alerting or the appearance of the device notices on the dashboard

• Test - you may want monitoring and alerting (sent to one email) and but not displaying device info on the dashboard.

• Maintenance - you want monitoring and collection to occur, and maybe or maybe not the device on the dashboard, just not alerting going occuring

• Decommissioned - no monitoring, no dashboard, no alerting

Defining Production States for Devices

You can set the Production State for a device or group of device(s) by going to the Edit Tab for the device or device group and changing the Production State drop-down to whatever state you want the new Production State to be. The default Production state when you add a device is Production. If you change the Production State for a hierarchy of devices, the Production state propagates down the hierarchy except when you define an exception to the
Production State further down the hierarchy.
Maintenance Windows
The Start Production State for the Maintenance Window is the state that the monitoring for the device (or group of devices) is in when the Maintenance Window begins or “opens”. For example, if your device(s) are running along in a Production State of “Production” (meaning you are monitoring and alerting on the devices normally) and the Maintenance Window opening time arrives, the Production State changes to the maintenance Window’s Start Production State. For example, if the the Start Production State is set to Maintenance, this means you want monitoring and data collection to continue to occur for the device, but you don’t want alerts to occur or any warnings to appear on the dashboard. You can use this time to reboot the machine or make configuration changes that would normally create alerts and not have them actually send alerts. You can either schedule a Maintenance Window or change the Production State for the device manually at the time you want to make the changes. When the Maintenance window closes, the device(s) change to the End Production State for the Maintenance Window. You define the End Production State for the Maintenance Window. This refers to the Production State that you want the device(s) to revert to when the Maintenance Window ends.
So the Start Production State is the state you want when the Maintenance Window opens - if I were setting up a Maintenance Window, I would define the window such that when its time for the Maintenance Window to occur, I want the Start Production State to be Maintenance, and then when the Maintenance Window time frame expires, I want the Stop Production State to be Production, meaning its back to monitoring and alerting as normal. This would save sending out known alerts alerts as you rebooted or whatever.

Creating Maintenance Windows in Zenoss

You can create a Maintenance Window for an individual device or for any grouping of devices in any hierarchy you create and define. For the device or group of devices, go to the Manage Tab. In the Maintenance Window area, add a name for the Maintenance window and click the Add button. Now you can set the properties for the Maintenance Window by clicking the name of the Maintenance Window in the Maintenance Window list. The Start area defines when the Maintenance Window will begin. It is defined by date first and then the second set of numbers refer to hour and minute based on a 24 hour clock. Define all of the properties and click Save. You have now created and defined a new Maintenance Window.