Guide

Silences

A silence stops notifications. It never stops monitoring, and it always has an end.

Step by step

1. Alerting → Silences → + New silence.
2. Reason, and it is required: what work is happening and where it is tracked. Whoever finds this window at three in the morning is not you.
3. Scope and Value: a host, a group, a check type or a label. Left blank it silences everything, which is almost never what you meant.
4. Starts now, in an hour, in four, or tomorrow. Expires after anything from thirty minutes to seven days. There is no “never”, on purpose.
5. For work that comes back, tick Repeat this window: the days it opens on, the time it starts, how long it lasts, and the time zone that clock is read on, so the window survives a change of clocks. Repeat until is the last day it opens; the expiry above still ends the whole silence.
6. The list is Active now, Scheduled and Expired. Edit extends or shortens a window and Lift ends it now; both keep the record of who opened it and why.

A silence is not an acknowledgement

There is a Silence button on an incident too, and it does one job: stop the pages for that one story. The incident stays open and unacknowledged, and an escalation that was climbing is cancelled — so nobody can tell from the screen that you are on it.

If you are handling it, press Acknowledge. That is the one that says a person has it, stops the repeats and leaves your name on it.

The one thing people get wrong

Where to go next

Then the rotation those pages actually go to.

• On-call
• Where alerts go
• All the guides