The next big enhancement to Maintenance Windows is nearly here! With this update, you’ll be able to set recurring maintenance windows and pause checks automatically on a routine cycle. This enables you to do things like stop the alerts while you run your daily backups.

Choose from a daily, weekly or monthly schedule, and let it run until further notice, or have it cancel automatically on a chosen date. You can very easily add a recurring maintenance window to a single device or to a whole collection of devices – just right-click devices in the North Pane or select a client or site in the client tree.

Of course, you can also still set one-time maintenance windows, for instance if you want to pause the checks while you take a device offline to perform an upgrade.

In this release, we also have a couple of updates to Patch Management as we gear up for a series of major enhancements to the feature. With this update we’ll be improving the loading speed of the Patch Approval dialog. This is just the start, so stay tuned for more improvements on the way.

All the details…
Here’s a quick run-through of the latest Maintenance Windows improvements:

1. To set up a recurring maintenance window, select one or multiple devices, right-click to bring up the context menu, then select Schedule under Maintenance Mode (1).

2. On the Maintenance Schedule dialog use the new “Repeat” option to create a recurring maintenance window (2). You can select a daily, weekly or monthly schedule (3).

3. Once a maintenance mode is set on a device, the status column in the North Pane will tell you whether it’s pending or active, and whether it’s a one-time or a recurring Maintenance Window (4). The traffic cone icon also shows in the client tree to tell you when a client or site has devices that are currently in maintenance mode.

4. As before, you can set a maintenance window for all the devices at a client or site – simply right-click in the Client Tree or pick the option from the Edit menu above (5).

5. The “Current Schedule” section in the Maintenance Window dialog shows you if any of the selected devices already have a maintenance window. When you add a new Maintenance Window it will replace any that were previously set (6).

Please note: if you select a one-time Maintenance Window, this will replace any recurring Maintenance Windows set on the device. It’s currently not possible to schedule multiple Maintenance Windows for a device, but this is something we’re looking to add in a future update.

Patch Management enhancements
We’ve made some performance improvements to the Patch Approval dialog, so that it loads and responds more quickly. We’ve also updated the Patch Status filter so it shows just the missing patches by default, to help focus the dialog on what’s most important in your day-to-day workflow. These are the first in a series of Patch Management enhancements, and we’re looking forward to bringing you further improvements in our future updates.

Let us know what you think
As ever, we’re already working on the next set of Maintenance Windows updates, including the option to roll out recurring Maintenance Windows centrally using a policy-based approach. We’ll also be adding the ability to select checks so you can choose if you want to apply a maintenance window to the entire device or just to selected checks. Please continue to let us know what you think and share your feedback!

And finally…
The staging release notes are listed below.

Staging Release Notes
Please note that 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 v5.63
– No new Agent version

Dashboard v5.63
FEATURE: Set daily, weekly, and monthly recurring maintenance windows
UPDATE: Improve dialog loading performance for the Patch Approval dialog
UPDATE: Set default status to Missing on the Patch Approval dialog
UPDATE: Make clearer with new logo that customers in the US can use American Express when setting up automatic payment
BUGFIX: Resolve issue with the Severity column filter on the Patch Approval dialog
BUGFIX: Resolve issue with duplicate entries for Software under Asset Tracking
BUGFIX: Ensure the MAV Quarantine Check is consistently added during feature installation
BUGFIX: Ensure the Event Log check consistently displays correctly
BUGFIX: Ensure the AD Sync dialog shows the correct AD Server
BUGFIX: Ensure pending agent updates are handled correctly in the Agent Auto-update dialog