Use maintenance rules to mark CIs in maintenance status. When in maintenance status, these CIs are excluded from impact calculation.

Before you begin

Role required: evt_mgmt_admin

About this task

You can define rules to mark CIs that match the specified criteria as being in maintenance status. The marked CIs populate the Impact Maintenance CIs [em_impact_maint_ci] table.

Note: When running maintenance rules, the cmdb_ci status of matching CIs is not changed. However, matching CIs are flagged in the em_impact_maint_ci table by these rules and this status is considered for impact and alert calculations.

The field flagged by this rule as being in maintenance status is the CMDB status field.

Note: To activate a maintenance rule, select the Active field in the maintenance rule. To deactivate a maintenance rule, clear the Active field.
The maintenance rules provided with the base instance are:
Default maintenance rule Description
CI in Change Window Where the CI has an active change window, the matching CIs are marked as being in maintenance status.
The rule runs a query against the change request [change_request] table to determine whether the rule is applied. All these conditions in the change_request table must be met:
  • State is one of these options: Scheduled, Implement, Work in Progress, or Open/New (state in (-2, -1, 1, 2)).
  • Approval is Approved (approval = 'approved').
  • The change request window is active, that is, the current time is between Planned start date and Planned end date, or the current time is between Actual start date and Actual end date.
  • The change request record is not an on-hold record (on_hold='false').
Note: All these conditions must be present for the CI to be placed in maintenance status by this rule. For example, if the State of the change request approval status is Change is waiting for approval, then the change is not added to the em_impact_maint_ci table.
Maintenance status of CI CIs whose CMDB status field is In Maintenance are flagged by this rule as being in maintenance status.
By default, retired CIs are not included in CIs that are In Maintenance. To include retired CIs:
  1. Navigate to All Properties.
  2. Select New.
  3. Configure the evt_mgmt.maintenance_rule_include_retired property with Value = true.
Note:

Including thousands of retired CIs may decrease system performance.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to All > Event Management > Rules > Maintenance Rules.
  2. Click New.
  3. Fill in the fields, as appropriate.
    Column heading Description
    Name The maintenance rule name.
    Active Select to activate the maintenance rule.
    Advanced Select to enable the optional script section to display.
    Description Information that describes this maintenance rule.
    Flag CIs that run on this host Select to flag all applications running on the recognized host as being in maintenance.
    Table Select the table that contains the CI that you require.
    Filter Specify how to select the data.
    CI field name Select the CI from the list. The list is populated according to your selection in the Table field.

    If a CMDB table, or a table derived from CMDB, was selected, specify sys_id for the CI field name. Otherwise, specify the required CI field that you want to use. See the examples.
  4. Click Submit.

Example

Example of a maintenance rule using a CMDB table.

Assume that a company defines a CI as being in maintenance when the Operational Status of the CI is either Repair in Progress or DR Standby.

Event Management rule

Example of a maintenance rule using a table other than CMDB.

Assume that a company uses Incident records to track maintenance. Any maintenance request is translated to an incident when it has a description that starts with “Performing maintenance on CI”. As long as the status of such an incident is open, this status indicates that the maintenance is in progress. For the CI field name field, specify a CI name from the table that was chosen, in this case Incident.

Event Management table

Example of a maintenance rule that uses the advanced script feature.

In the Maintenance Rule page, select the Advanced option. Customize the provided example script: 
var now_GR = new GlideRecord('cmdb_ci');
gr.addQuery('name', 'your_name_here');
gr.query();
while (gr.next()){
 result.push(gr.sys_id +'');}
The return value for this example script is a text string that represents an array of CI IDs, for example, ['sys_id1','sys_id2','sys_id3'].

You can use this script as an example to prepare your own customized script.

Event Management script