When you know that you're going to be performing maintenance on your site, or on a part of the network, please let us know.  If we receive alerts that services and systems are going down, we respond aggressively, believing that something is wrong.  You can open a ticket that tells us about maintenance, and if you're more of the take-charge type, you can put the systems into scheduled downtime on your own.

When you log in to Nagios and select your systems, you'll see the option to schedule downtime for the host or service in the menu on the right.  Selecting this option will take you to a screen where you can choose from several options:

• Host Name / Service - The short name of the host/service which is going into maintenance
• Comment - A comment about why the service is being performed.  We put the ticket number in this field.
• Triggered By - This field can be used to set cascading downtime, where a host or service goes into downtime and others see that event and put themselves into scheduled downtime as well.
• Start / End Time, Fixed / Flexible, Duration - This is the rigid start/stop of the downtime window if you choose Fixed.  If you choose Flexible, then this works with Duration to say that "sometime in this window, the host or service will go down - when it does, put it into downtime for the period specified by Duration."
• Child Hosts - Hosts have children - a firewall or router has child hosts behind it.  When the firewall or router goes down, those hosts may become unreachable.  This specifies what action to take when this happens.  The best action is to have your child hosts go into the same downtime window and type as you've set your parent hosts to use.