A calm, minimal maintenance playbook
Planned work shouldn't require a war room. This playbook keeps the process simple for uptime monitoring: schedule the window, warn stakeholders, mute downtime alerts, verify the change. It's the 80/20 toolkit for teams who want reliable maintenance without reinventing ITIL. Your uptime monitor can pause downtime notifications during maintenance windows. With uptime monitoring, you can schedule maintenance windows that automatically pause downtime alerts from website monitoring and API monitoring.
Playbook chapters
- Plan: Identify impacted monitors from your uptime monitoring, choose timing, and assign owners.
- Communicate: Notify stakeholders using templates for internal/external audiences and update status pages.
- Execute: Pause downtime alerts with PingPuffin maintenance windows and run your checklist.
- Verify: Resume uptime monitoring, confirm status pages reflect uptime status, and log learnings for next time.
Download & customise
The playbook is available as a PDF and Notion template. Duplicate it, adapt the checklists to your infrastructure, and share with operations, developers, and customer support so everyone follows the same process.
Share it with your team, tweak the steps, and run it as often as you ship. PingPuffin handles the alert muting so you can focus on doing the work.
Maintenance playbook FAQ
Can we use the playbook without PingPuffin?
Yes. The process works with any monitoring tool. If you do use PingPuffin, maintenance windows and notifications are already built in.
Who should follow the playbook?
Operations, DevOps, SREs, agencies—anyone running planned work. Share the checklist with customer-facing teams so they know what to expect.
How do we prove maintenance was successful?
PingPuffin logs when the window started and ended, which monitors were paused, and when everything was verified. Export the report for compliance or client communication.