Maintenance Windows

Maintenance Windows

A maintenance window tells Groundskeeper that a device, a connector, or the whole estate is expected to be off or unreachable at a known time -- a firewall that installs its firmware at 04:00 on Sundays, the switches being replaced on Saturday, a power-down weekend.

Without one, a planned reboot looks identical to the device dying: a critical on the feed, an email to whoever is on the critical list, and the morning briefing leading with it.

Adding a window

Settings -> School -> Maintenance Windows, beside your term dates. Each row has:

• Name -- what shows on the feed, e.g. Firebox Sunday firmware update.
• Covers -- a connector (or Any connector), and optionally a list of devices, one per line, by hostname or IP address. Leave both open to cover everything.
• When -- Weekly (tick the days, set a start and end time) or One-off (a from and a to date and time). A weekly window whose end is earlier than its start runs overnight and belongs to the day it starts: Saturday 23:00 to 01:00 is Saturday night.
• Note -- optional, for your own reference.

Times are your school's local time, the clock on the server.

What happens inside a window

• An outage on a covered device is still recorded on the feed, so the history is complete, but as an info event carrying a Maintenance badge and the window's name -- not a warning or critical.
• No email and no Teams/Slack message is sent for it.
• The Devices page's warning count and the AI's issue list do not count it. The AI briefing sees it labelled as expected, so it can say "the Firebox updated overnight as scheduled" rather than nothing.
• The dashboard's System card says which window is active and until when.
• The recovery ("back online") is recorded exactly as always.

Outside a window, nothing changes.

The safety catch

If the device is still down when the window ends, plus a short grace (10 minutes by default, adjustable on the same tab), Groundskeeper raises one real alert at the original severity: Still down after maintenance window: .... A window can never hide an update that went wrong or a contractor who did not finish.

Automatic windows from Meraki

If the Cisco Meraki connector is enabled, Groundskeeper reads Meraki's own firmware upgrade schedule on every poll. Each upgrade Meraki has scheduled becomes a window for exactly the devices it will reboot (by name and by serial), for the length set on the connector -- 45 minutes by default. An access point going offline during its own upgrade is then recorded as expected rather than as a fault, and the Network card stays green for it.

The Maintenance Windows card shows these windows read-only. The schedule itself -- every upgrade Meraki has planned for your networks, and those completed in the last week, with the network, product, version and local time -- is at the bottom of the Cisco Meraki connector's own settings (Connector Settings -> Cisco Meraki). A newly scheduled upgrade is announced on the dashboard feed, and again if Meraki moves or cancels it; nothing is posted when it completes, because the devices' own expected outage and recovery are the record. Untick Treat Meraki's scheduled firmware upgrades as maintenance windows on the connector to turn this off.

Notes

• A one-off window that finished more than a week ago is shown greyed as finished and is ignored; delete it when you like.
• Windows are stored in config.yaml under maintenance_windows, so they travel with a settings backup.

Last updated: 2026-09-03 (v0.129.0)