Benefits
No false-positive alerts
Monitors in a maintenance state skip checks entirely. No downtime events are recorded, and no alert notifications are dispatched to your team.
Accurate uptime metrics
Paused check periods are excluded from uptime calculations, so a planned deployment does not drag down your SLA percentage.
Advance subscriber notice
Subscribers receive an email as soon as you save a maintenance window, giving them time to plan around the downtime.
Visible status page banner
Your status page automatically shows a maintenance banner for the duration of the window, so visitors always know what to expect.
Schedule a maintenance window
1
Navigate to your monitor or status page
Go to Dashboard → Monitors and select the monitor you want to put into maintenance, or go to Dashboard → Pages and select your status page to schedule maintenance that affects multiple monitors at once.
2
Click Schedule Maintenance
Click the Schedule Maintenance button in the top-right corner of the monitor or status page detail view.
3
Set the window details
Fill in the following fields:
4
Choose affected monitors
Select one or more monitors from the list. Only the monitors you select will be paused — all other monitors continue checking normally.
5
Save and notify subscribers
Click Save. PulseGuard immediately sends a maintenance announcement email to all subscribers who follow at least one of the affected monitors. The maintenance window also appears in the upcoming-maintenance section of your status page.
Monitors in a
MAINTENANCE state skip checks entirely for the duration of the window — no checks are run, no events are recorded, and no alerts are sent. When the window ends, PulseGuard automatically resumes normal checking and clears the maintenance banner.Manual status overrides
Sometimes you need to display a different status for a specific day without scheduling a full maintenance window — for example, to acknowledge a known degradation that does not meet your incident threshold, or to mark a day as “under observation” without suppressing checks. Go to Dashboard → Pages → your page → Overrides and click Add Override. Select the date and choose the status to display (Operational, Degraded, or Under Maintenance). The override only affects what is displayed on the status page for that calendar day — monitors continue running checks as normal.
Manual overrides are purely cosmetic. Unlike a maintenance window, they do not pause checks or suppress alert notifications. Use maintenance windows when you need to fully suppress monitoring during planned downtime.
Recurring maintenance windows
For teams with regular maintenance schedules — such as weekly off-hours deployments or nightly database backups — you can set a maintenance window to repeat automatically. When creating or editing a maintenance window, toggle Recurring on and choose a repeat interval:
Recurring windows appear as a single entry in the maintenance list with a recurrence badge. You can edit or cancel all future occurrences at once, or edit a single occurrence without affecting the rest of the series.
Maintenance window lifecycle
PulseGuard moves a maintenance window through the following states automatically:
You can manually end an active window early by clicking End Maintenance Now — useful when a deployment finishes ahead of schedule.
Best practices
Schedule windows as early as possible
Schedule windows as early as possible
Create maintenance windows at least 24 hours in advance so subscribers have time to see the announcement. For major changes, aim for 48–72 hours of advance notice.
Use descriptive titles
Use descriptive titles
The window title appears in subscriber emails and on your status page. Write titles that describe what is happening, not just that maintenance is occurring — for example, Primary database failover — scheduled migration is far more informative than Maintenance.
Extend windows rather than cancelling them
Extend windows rather than cancelling them
If a deployment takes longer than expected, extend the maintenance window end time rather than letting it expire. This prevents PulseGuard from resuming checks mid-deployment and generating false alerts.
Review your uptime reports after maintenance
Review your uptime reports after maintenance
After a window completes, check Dashboard → Monitors → your monitor → Reports to confirm the paused period is correctly excluded from your uptime percentage. The summary should show the maintenance interval clearly labelled.