We’re excited to bring you the next update to Maintenance Windows, following the release of Part 1 back in February.

This latest release will allow you to schedule a future start and stop time for Maintenance Mode… and not just for individual devices but at client and site level too.

Additionally, we’re making it easier for you to see which clients and sites have devices that are in maintenance mode so you won’t lose track of them.

What does this really mean for you?

Maintenance Windows Part 2 offers you a number of key benefits:

• Suppress unnecessary alerts
  You can now put an entire client or site in Maintenance Mode at the click of a button to temporarily pause monitoring on those devices, for example when you’re moving a client’s office.

• Raise productivity and responsiveness
  Now you can spend less time checking whether or not alerts are genuine and then discarding redundant ones. This means you can focus on the ones that matter -– more signal, less noise!

• Better operations management
  See which clients and sites have devices in maintenance mode, and then schedule future start and stop times so that you can match maintenance windows with planned work.

Looking ahead

As ever, we’ve got one eye on the future and we’re also working on our next set of Maintenance Windows enhancements, which will let you set recurring maintenance windows, another major boost to the feature that we’re pretty excited about. We’re also hard at work on our next Monitoring Templates update, which will enable you to choose whether you want to replace existing checks with a template, or add to the existing ones, so you can really start to build up devices using standard template configurations. And that’s just for starters … there’s much more to come, so stay tuned for future updates!

All the details…

In the meantime, here’s a detailed run-through of the current set of enhancements to Maintenance Windows:

1. Select one or more devices and open up the device context menu. Pick Maintenance Mode and then select the new Schedule option to set a future start and stop time (1)
   
2. When you set a future start and stop time, you can let it run until further notice, set it for the next few hours, or set a future date/time, it’s up to you (2).
   
3. When you open up the Maintenance Schedule dialog again for a device in Maintenance Mode, it shows you its current schedule. You can easily clear or update its settings (3).
   
4. You can perform the same Maintenance Windows actions from the Client Tree, so you can set a maintenance schedule to all devices in bulk. Just right click on a client or site and select Maintenance Mode (4). You can also use this option to easily cancel all current Maintenance Windows on a set of devices.
   
5. To see where you have devices in maintenance mode, there’s a little traffic cone icon in the Client Tree: a full traffic cone indicates all devices under that site or client are in Maintenance Mode, a smaller traffic cone shows that some but not all devices are in Maintenance Mode (5). Of course, it also shows you at device level in the North Pane (6) – drag the columns around to customise your display.
   
6. As per usual, the user activities are captured in the User Audit Log, which you can find under Reporting (7).
   

Let us know what you think

As always, please keep the feedback coming so we can continue to refine our future enhancements to best suit your needs. The current Maintenance Windows update directly includes feedback we received, namely the ability to quickly set “for X hours” when you turn on Maintenance Mode, so your feedback is valuable and it counts!

And finally…
The staging release notes are listed below:

Staging Release Notes

Please note, staging release notes are subject to change. Final release notes will go out with the release.

Summary for Service Release

• Service release focused on new features, bug fixes and performance
• Dashboard v5.59
• Agent v9.8.7 GA, Agent v9.8.8 RC

Dashboard v5.59
FEATURE: Schedule future start and stop times for Maintenance Windows
FEATURE: Set maintenance mode at Client and Site level in the Client Tree
FEATURE: See which Clients and Sites have devices in Maintenance Mode
UPDATE: CART definitions update to version 665
BUGFIX: Resolve an authentication issue with Take Control
BUGFIX: Ensure the PSA Errors triangle is displayed in the main Dashboard as well as in the Wall Chart
BUGFIX: Ensure the ‘Include Workstations’ in the ConnectWise PSA Asset Tracking tab is functioning correctly
BUGFIX: Ensure the XML Data Dump contains Site information
BUGFIX: Ensure the About tab under Help displays the correct phone number

Agent v9.8.8 RC
BUGFIX: Resolve an authentication issue with Take Control

Agent v9.8.7 GA
Includes all the updates since the current production Agent v9.8.6:

Agent v9.8.7 RC
FEATURE: Apply Monitoring Templates to selected devices, replacing existing checks