See vendor maintenance before it hits you
Maintenance shows up next to live incidents.
Live incidents get the attention. Planned maintenance is how you lose a Saturday deploy because the database host posted a window on Tuesday and nobody put it on the team calendar. A vendor maintenance calendar is just the scheduled-work slice of the same status feed you already watch.
What "maintenance" means on a status page
Vendors use the word loosely.
- Component maintenance: one product or region, often with a start and end time
- Emergency maintenance: posted with little notice, closer to an incident than a diary entry
- Calendar entries that never change the component state, only add a future event
Outage Clock records the scheduled events a vendor publishes alongside the current state. When a window starts, the component often moves to maintenance. When it ends, you get the same resolution message you would for an incident.
How to use the calendar
Once a week, skim the next seven days for vendors that can block a release or a billing run.
- Payments and auth: freeze feature work that depends on them, or warn finance
- Database host and cloud region: keep the deploy window off that slot
- Email sending: do not schedule a big campaign through the window
- CI: pick another afternoon for the release
Write the window on the team calendar with the vendor name, the component, and a link to the official post. One recurring reminder beats a channel full of "did anyone see this?"
Alerts vs the calendar
Page people for unplanned outages. Do not page for a window you have already accepted.
In Slack, a dedicated #vendor-status channel can take both, as long as the message says maintenance in the first line. In an incident tool, drop maintenance on a low-urgency route, or ignore it in the webhook handler.
The daily digest is a good place for windows that are days away. The live board is for "is it happening now?"
Gaps you should expect
Not every vendor publishes a trustworthy calendar. Some post five minutes before they start. Some mark the work as an incident instead of maintenance. Some never post at all and the first signal is a reachability check.
Treat the calendar as a planning aid, not a contract. If a vendor has surprised you before, put a human reminder on that vendor no matter what the feed says.
Questions
Can I export the windows to Google Calendar?
Not as a feed from us today. Copy the next window onto your team calendar. If you need an iCal file, say so via Support and we will keep count of the request.
Do you infer maintenance from downtime?
No. We show what the vendor labeled. A quiet outage still looks like an outage, not a window.