Planned work and surprise failure should never make the same sound. Maintenance windows are how your monitoring learns the difference.
Every office has planned downtime: Sunday patching, the NAS firmware update, the ISP's announced night work. Without maintenance windows, Uptime Kuma treats all of it as disaster — phones buzz, the uptime record takes dents, and staff learn the fatal habit of ignoring alerts. Uptime Kuma's Maintenance feature fixes this properly: chosen monitors, chosen hours, no false alarms, and the status page shows the work as planned. Here is how to use it — and how not to abuse it.
👆 Notice the shape of a healthy list: every window has an end time, a reason, and a small set of monitors — never “everything, forever”.
Kuma offers the strategies real life needs: a single one-time window for a specific job; recurring windows — daily, weekly or monthly — for rhythms like the Sunday patch hour; and a cron-style expression for odd patterns, for example 0 2 * * 0 means 2 AM every Sunday. Recurring windows are where the real peace comes from: set the patch hour once, and no future Patch Tuesday ever phones anyone again.
During the window, the chosen monitors are treated as under maintenance: their failures do not fire your phone alerts, and the window is not scored as an outage the way a surprise failure is. On the status page, the maintenance is displayed openly, so clients see planned work instead of a mystery gap. Outside the window, normal rules instantly apply — maintenance is a scheduled pause in judgement, not a blindfold.
The window existing inside Kuma is only half the job. Tell the humans: a line in the team chat (“server reboots Sunday 2–3 AM, alerts are muted by design”), and the status page note for clients. This kills the second-order problem — the colleague who sees a dark dashboard during the window and “helpfully” restarts things mid-patch, or the client who reports the planned outage as an emergency.
Maintenance lists rot quietly. Once a month, open the list and interrogate every entry: does this window still happen? Is the end time still real? Is anything muted that should not be? Delete stale windows without sentiment. A window that quietly became permanent is not a maintenance window any more — it is disabled monitoring wearing a costume, and it will be discovered at the worst possible moment.
Watch the video for the complete Uptime Kuma tour, then schedule your patch window once and sleep through every future one.
▶️ Watch Full VideoThe affected monitors are placed in maintenance state for the window: they stop generating down alerts and the period is marked as maintenance rather than counted as a plain outage. When the window ends, normal checking and alerting resume on their own — you do not have to remember to switch anything back on.
Yes — use the recurring strategy (weekly, on the weekday and times your patching actually happens) or a cron expression for stranger patterns. This is the intended use: your regular patch hour should be configured exactly once and then never thought about again.
Yes, maintenance affecting published monitors is shown on the status page as planned work. That visibility is a feature, not a leak: clients who can see “planned maintenance, Sunday 2 AM” do not open emergency tickets about it.