I am interested to know how the Maintenance flag works

[duane_walker]

When I set the maintenance flag on an alert does it suppress new alerts?

The documentation seems to say that it only affects the roll-up into the Overview page.   Also new, identical, alerts will also have the maintenance flag set if all previous identical alerts have the maintenance flag set.

How is the maintenance flag cleared?

It seems it could be cleared by receiving a recovery alert but also by removing the maintenance flag from the most recent alert.

[Tony Branton]

The following information relates to the Helsinki release:

The maintenance field on the Alert form can be set in a few ways:

• Inherit from a CI whose install_status field is set to "In Maintenance".   When this field is set back to "Installed", the maintenance field on the Alert form will be set to false automatically.
• If the Alert is bound to a CI that has an active Change Request it will be automatically set and then cleared when the change window ends
• Manually by checking the Maintenance checkbox on the Alert form
• Via an Event Rule
• Via a custom business rule or workflow

When the maintenance field is set to true in an Alert, it will remain that way until it's cleared either manually or automatically (e.g. CI install_status field changes, Change Request change windows ends, etc).   While the Alert is in Maintenance, it will continue to be updated by any matching events.   Since Event Management de-duplicates identical events you won't see identical Alerts - events matching the Alert (using the message_key field) will just update the existing Alert.

If the Alert's severity field is updated by new events while the Alert is in Maintenance, the change in the Alert severity will not be applied to any related business services.   When the Alert (or CI) is taken out of Maintenance, if the severity had changed while the Alert was in Maintenance the change will then be applied to the related business services.

Alert Rules should be configured to only execute if an Alert's Maintenance field is set to False.

Hope that provides some clarity on how maintenance works in Event Management - if not let me know.