What's the difference between snoozing, acknowledging, and maintenance periods?

Oh Dear gives you three ways to silence notifications, each built for a different situation. In all three cases we keep running your checks in the background - you just decide what you want to hear about.

Acknowledging: "I know, I'm on it"

Acknowledging is a reaction to an active incident. Your uptime check fails, the alert comes in, and you're already working on a fix. You don't need a reminder every few minutes.

• Works per check (e.g. only the uptime check, while certificate alerts stay active).
• Silences the repeated problem notifications for that incident.
• The recovery notification still comes through, and it ends the acknowledgement. If the same check fails again five minutes later, that's a new incident, and you'll be alerted right away.
• You pick a duration as a safety net: alerting resumes when the check recovers or when the timer runs out, whichever comes first.

You'll find the Acknowledge button on the check page whenever a check is failing, and you can acknowledge straight from the alert itself: the e-mail contains one-click links, and Slack and Telegram messages carry an acknowledge action.

Snoozing: "keep quiet for a while"

Snoozing is preventive. The check is healthy, but you know noise is coming - a planned migration, a flaky third-party API, a DNS change you're rolling out.

• Works per check, just like acknowledging.
• It's the full mute: both the problem and the recovery notifications stay silent for the duration you pick. You muted it, so you own the quiet window, nothing at all comes through until the timer runs out.
• That's the difference from an acknowledgement: you acknowledge a problem you already know about (so you still want the "all clear"), but you snooze a check pre-emptively (so you don't want to hear from it at all).

The same button reads Snooze while a check is healthy and Acknowledge while it's failing, and the behaviour follows the label. Scheduled task (cron) checks have no recovery moment either way, so their silences always run until the timer expires.

Maintenance periods: "mute the whole monitor"

A maintenance period is the heavyweight option for planned work on an entire site or server.

• Works per monitor: every check on that monitor goes quiet at once.
• Silences both problem and recovery notifications - nothing comes through until the window ends.
• Downtime during a maintenance period is not recorded, so your uptime numbers and reports stay clean.
• Can be scheduled ahead of time, one-off or recurring (think weekly deploy windows).

Which one should you use?

Rule of thumb: something broke and you're on it? Acknowledge. Expecting noise on one check? Snooze. Taking the whole site down on purpose? Plan a maintenance period.

For the step-by-step on silencing a single check, see Can I snooze a single check on a monitor?. Full docs: How to acknowledge or snooze notifications.