How to announce scheduled maintenance?

Scheduled maintenance is the easiest way to inform your customers who use your product that you are unavailable for a certain period of time due to maintenance work. Moreover, it is also the most effective way to be monitored by the team members who will take part in the study and other units that need to be informed about the maintenance work process.

Applications, websites or APIs need scheduled maintenance work at certain time intervals. During these times, the team behind the application quickly carries out maintenance operations such as performance improvements, updates or backups.

Have you seen the maintenance notification page Twitter shared with its audience in the past?

Image sourced from blog of Twitter

Maintenance studies are usually repeated within a certain period of time and the biggest difference compared to incident is that it is planned about when it will start and when it will end. In this respect, it is not foreseen to work as stressful and intensive as in incident management. However; companies, which are aware that customer satisfaction should always be at the forefront, know that maintenance management is as important as incident management.

There are 2 important stages when it comes to maintenance. The first of these is to inform the audience clearly and transparently long enough before the maintenance work begins. It is very significant to share clearly with the audience how the work will be done towards which target and also the estimated working time. The second is the temporary maintenance pages that warn your users in a simple, entertaining way and share the necessary contact information on your website/application when the scheduled maintenance is due.

Having these two issues handled very well shows your respect to your customers and thus gives you strength against your competitors in your market. The size of your company or the number of your product users is not important at this point. On the other hand, if you look for example “it is just 10 minutes of maintenance work at night, nothing will happen”, you will lose. Since, unannounced service interruptions create a perception far from professionalism and greatly damage customer satisfaction. As a result, it causes your users to turn to alternative competitor products.

Well, now let's focus on our first point and look at the maintenance life process, let's examine the workflows in detail:

1.Plan: Our first step is; what your maintenance work will be about, which team will complete what tasks during the work, when the work will start and the estimated working time should be determined by the relevant team of the company.

2.Schedule: Now we need to set a schedule for maintenance work according to the planned data we have. In addition, more detailed actions such as indicating the services affected in the study to be carried out, the impact value to which the relevant services are affected, and whether or not an in-house announcement will be made are determined at this stage. At this step, the first announcement is made to the audiences through the various communication channels of the status page product.

3.Update: There may be any change in the planned data before the specified calendar time comes. All necessary updates are made in this step. It is very important that the changes made are announced again to both internal employees and public audiences.

4.Start & Monitoring: When the scheduled time is due, the maintenance page should be shared on the official website. As we mentioned earlier, the maintenance page should present vital information to followers in a simple and a little fun way, without going into too much detail. If available, it would be good to share predictive information about when the study will end.

In addition, audiences should be announced again via the status page product that the maintenance operation has started. During the maintenance work, it is recommended to make monitoring notifications about the progress of the process, especially to the relevant units and employees within the institution, in terms of managing the process.

5.Finish: When the maintenance work is completed, an action is taken to confirm that the process is completed through the status page product used. Thus, the maintenance announcement published in the communication channels is removed. In addition, internal and public followers are contacted by sending a notification that the maintenance work has been completed. Also, remember to remove the maintenance page from the official website, it is important to synchronize with the status page product here.

Hosted Status Page & Scheduled Maintenance

At this point, StatusEntry offers the Maintenance feature to help its customers with the first step we mentioned above. The maintenance feature, which is very simple to manage in terms of UX and UI, is very advantageous in gaining user habit thanks to its similar structure with incident workflow.

*Record of public schedule maintenance in the public status page

*Record of external schedule maintenance in the public status page

How StatusEntry announces scheduled maintenance?

You can do maintenance planning and updating as much as you want without any restrictions.
You can instantly communicate with your employees and public audiences by sending notifications for your planned maintenance work through various channels.
If there will be maintenance work that you do not want to announce to your public audience, you can send notifications only to your in-house employees through the integration channels you want by selecting the internal option.
Public scheduled maintenance is displayed under Future Maintenance on PSP and is blue in color.
As soon as the run starts, StatusEntry sends another reminder notification for you.
An incident with "Maintenance impact" will be automatically created under the Incident list with "Identified status" so that you can monitor and update the maintenance work progress. In order to distinguish this incident record from other incident records in your incidents list, we have put the maintenance key icon at the bottom right.
You may not always have enough time to schedule maintenance work. For some urgent situations, it may be necessary to start maintenance work immediately. In such cases, you do not necessarily need to plan your maintenance work in advance. Under the Incident title, you can create an incident whose impact value is maintenance.
We hope the maintenance work was completed smoothly. You can terminate your maintenance by turning it to “Resolved” status. StatusEntry will make finish notifications instantly in the communication channels you wish.
You can list your past maintenance records under the "Completed Maintenances" heading on the maintenance detail list page; you can delete your past records at any time.