Maintenance windows make it easy to automatically fulfill change requests and VM rightsizing recommendations at expected, well-known times. While the fulfillment time for a change request can be manually scheduled, maintenance windows enable you to remove the burden from the administrator while still avoiding any impact on customers' use of their services.
Design considerations
When setting maintenance windows to fulfill change requests, consider the following:
- Do you need distinct windows for different organizations, or for production and development services?
- Do you want to allow Service Portal users to schedule their own change request fulfillment? What about allowing them to schedule rightsizing recommendations during the maintenance window?
Best practices
Configure the Default Attributes policy to automatically assign the correct maintenance group to new services.
Examples
You can set a maintenance window to fulfill the following types of change requests:
- VM resource changes: A user submits a resource change request that requires powering down the VM. The approval workflow for this change request form is configured to fulfill disruptive requests during the maintenance window.
- Virtual service decommissioning: A user submits a request to decommission a virtual service. The requester uses the Schedule form element to specify that the virtual service should be decommissioned during the maintenance window.
- Database backup: A user submits a change request to run a database backup. The approval workflow for this change request form is configured to fulfill requests during the maintenance window. A completion workflow with an Execute Script step to run the backup is also assigned to this change request form.
