Using Maintenance Windows for Orchestration and follow-up purposes

[Ingrida]

hi dear Dynatrace Community,

It's not a simple question I want to ask you all, but rather invitation to ideas sharing and discussion. 

Here is the subject of it:

• We monitoring with few Dynatrace environments several thousands Hosts in mixed modes
• We have Orchestration tool which set ups them in MW's on demand using tags
• We will open MW API for our users in order to be able to set up MW's on demand (for scheduled jobs f.e.) in open way (most likely using tags will be recommendation too as tags are based on our cmdb info which is single source of truth, or at least should be)
• We planned to keep these MW set even after they pass to track in things in PMR's (Post Mortem Reviews) and similar
• HOWEVER:  we hit the limit of 2000 MW's max available for one DT Environment.

So, we most likely use MW's not in a way it is intended to be (actually we will not even be able to set up a MW per host soon and this is theoretical possibile on our Orchestration tool)

On the other side, we need to bo able to track at any point and time which host / entity was in MW and why, but if we start to delete MW's, we loose this info.

Anybody here with a hint, ideas (crazy as it pops up in mind) about it?

Thanks!

Ingrida

P.S. @Community leads: I wonder if there is not just Q&A sections and ideas section but discussion section here.

P.P.S. @Community leads:  I wonder if we would need Automation Section in Community some day...

[Ingrida]

Kudos are great, good ideas would be better 🙂 

So war internally we ended up thinking if we should transform expired maintenance windows into events meanwhile to "safe" place for running / incomming ones and still have MW's for post  mortem investigation purposes. 

P.S. for Dynatrace guys: what about filtering for expired windows? 🙂 

It will not work for reoccuring Maintenance Windows... so we are not sure what we would do with them. 

I.

[Ingrida · Accepted solution]

Closing the topic as we have a solution / workaround for us, which kinda works acceptable for us:

1. As MW is starting, an custom info event will be generated with information about start of  MW

2. As MW ist ending, an custom info event will be  generated with information about end of MW 

3. With expiration of MW, MW will be deleted.

Wish list towards dynatrace PM team(s):

- It would be nice if it would be implemented by DT one day

- it would me nice to habe "expired" property in MW API and not just in UI

Best regards,

Ingrida