We are excited to announce the next step of the rollout of our Maintenance Events system on the Instaclustr Platform!
Maintenance Events provides customers with visibility into the maintenance actions that Instaclustr performs on their clusters. It maintains a history of what actions are performed, and when. Any time Instaclustr starts a maintenance event, a brief description of the work to be carried out will be provided, along with the expected impact on the customer’s application.
We have previously been using this mechanism for notifications around operating system upgrades. However, we are in the process of expanding this to additional forms of maintenance.
Over the coming weeks you will see additional types of maintenance events being created, beginning with a focus on utilizing the system for situations where Instaclustr staff are required to access application instances.
Some forms of maintenance will not yet be utilizing the maintenance event system. Over time we will continue to add additional types of maintenance with an aim of achieving complete coverage.
Performing maintenance on instances is a necessary part of any managed service. This can include implementing customer requests, security patching, upgrading the host operating system, upgrading applications themselves, or configuring additional Instaclustr tooling on the instances.
When we do create a new scheduled maintenance event, customers will be notified via the maintenance contact email address specified for each account.
We realize that customers with a large number of clusters may receive a significant number of email notifications. To manage this efficiently, we recommend updating your maintenance email contact to a dedicated mailing address exclusively used for this purpose.
Initially this system will only allow notifications via email. We plan to introduce more customization of customer notifications including selecting which events to be notified about and alternative methods of notification, such as webhooks for Slack integration.
For customers who have not specified a maintenance email address, we will use your support contact. For more information, see our support documentation on our different types of support contacts.
You can find maintenance events for your clusters on the Instaclustr console. Viewing any upcoming scheduled maintenance events and scheduling exclusion times can also be done through the Instaclustr API and Terraform provider.
If you have any questions around the maintenance scheduling features, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Instaclustr Support.