The challenge of planned maintenance
Every IT environment requires regular patching, updates, and restarts. Servers reboot, operating systems get patched, and applications are temporarily offline during upgrades. While these activities are expected, they still create a ripple effect in observability platforms.
Dynatrace continues to detect anomalies when services go down and it should. But during planned maintenance, this leads to unnecessary problem tickets and alerts that do not require action. The result: teams get distracted by noise, incident processes are interrupted, and alert fatigue increases.
Why this is a problem
Dynatrace’s strength lies in automatically identifying problems, analyzing root causes, and highlighting all impacted entities. But without context, planned downtime looks exactly the same as unexpected downtime.
For example:
- A server reboot generates host availability alerts.
- An application patch makes a database connection temporarily unavailable.
- During an OS update, multiple dependent services may report problems.
Each of these cases is true from Dynatrace’s perspective — but they are not useful to your support teams.
Why not just use Dynatrace’s built-in maintenance windows?
Dynatrace already includes native maintenance windows. These work well for long-term, recurring schedules (for example, a weekly patch window every Sunday night) or complex combination of various entities.
However, many teams run into challenges when they need to handle ad-hoc or short-term maintenance:
- Too many steps – Creating or editing a window means diving into the global settings, which is not practical for quick operational work.
- Not operator-friendly – Often, only admins define windows; support engineers or on-call staff can’t easily start or stop maintenance when they need to.
- Tag usage is cumbersome – While supported, setting up tag-based rules requires more configuration than most operators want to deal with in the moment.
- Limited visibility – It’s not always obvious which windows are currently active, which leads to uncertainty during incidents or changes.
The Maintenance Mode Manager app focuses on the most common, day-to-day use cases:
- Quickly put one or more Dynatrace entities into maintenance.
- See which windows are active right now, at a glance.
- End maintenance immediately when work is finished.
It doesn’t try to replace every scenario that the native Dynatrace features cover. Instead, it provides a streamlined, easy-to-use workflow for the cases that operators and support teams encounter most often.
The solution: Maintenance Mode Manager
The Maintenance Mode Manager app was built to make Dynatrace smarter during planned changes. It extends Dynatrace with a lightweight, purpose-built interface that makes maintenance mode practical and visible.
Key features include:
- 🖥 point and click based maintenance windows: select one or multiple Dynatrace components and define the time range of planned work.
- 👀 Active window overview: quickly see what is in maintenance at any moment.
- ⏱ Instant start and stop: begin or end maintenance with a single click.
With these simple controls, Dynatrace stays quiet during maintenance, while continuing to monitor everything else. Once the window ends, problem detection and alerting automatically return to normal.
The business value
Introducing maintenance awareness into Dynatrace brings both operational and business benefits:
- Less alert noise → support teams stay focused on real incidents.
- Smoother change management → planned downtime no longer triggers unnecessary escalations.
- Increased productivity → fewer distractions mean more efficient operations.
- Improved trust in monitoring → stakeholders know alerts reflect actual issues.
See it in action
The Maintenance Mode Manager is designed to make Dynatrace smarter during the times when change is intentional. Instead of silencing monitoring entirely, you can precisely target what needs to be muted — and keep full visibility everywhere else.
👉 Learn more about the app and how to get started on the product page.
More information about pricing and availability