How to configure maintenance windows

An active maintenance window prevents notifications from being sent. This is handy during planned downtime or while deploying your application.

For example when you integrated Application Health Monitoring you can let Oh Dear keep an eye on Horizon (Laravel Redis queue manager). The moment Horizon goes down, Oh Dear can detect this and can notify you.

When deploying, you'll likely restart Horizon at some point in your script. When restarting, Horizon first shuts down and then starts again. This happens almost instantly, but Oh Dear can still detect this small window of downtime, resulting in an unwanted notification.

How to initiate and end a maintenance window #

You can initiate a maintenance window via the API, the SDK or with the Oh Dear CLI package. Depending on the framework you have several options to implement the maintenance windows feature.

Laravel

The easiest and most likely way of implementing it for Laravel apps is using the CLI package and extending your current deployment script.

Add this command at the start of your script: ohdear-cli maintenance period:start [site-id] [seconds]. The site-id is the ID of your site in Oh Dear (find it with ohdear-cli sites:list). The seconds value is the maximum time the maintenance window should be active - set it longer than your deployment takes. At the end of your script, end the maintenance window with ohdear-cli maintenance period:stop [site-id].

An alternative way to work with maintenance windows without any package is via the API by using curl. Which is explained in the next section.

Any other framework

For any other framework you can use the same approach but you will need to use the Oh Dear API directly. First set a variable containing the API token like this:

$ OHDEAR_TOKEN="your API token"

$ curl -X POST https://ohdear.app/api/monitors/1/start-maintenance \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $OHDEAR_TOKEN" \
    -H 'Accept: application/json' \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json'

Then at the end of your script you can end the maintenance window with:

$ curl -X POST https://ohdear.app/api/monitors/1/stop-maintenance \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $OHDEAR_TOKEN" \
    -H 'Accept: application/json' \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json'

Good to know #

Maintenance windows default to a 60-minute period and will automatically end after that time. For more details, see Maintenance windows via the API and Maintenance windows via the SDK.