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Maintenance incidents allow your teams to plan, coordinate, and communicate progress of your planned downtime and maintenance windows. Create a Maintenance Incident in the Rootly web app under Incidents > Maintenance. 
Rootly does not automatically generate a Slack channel for Maintenance Incidents. Create one by selecting the Slack icon under the incident title in the web app.
After the maintenance incident has been created, share it on your Status Pages.

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Schedule a Maintenance Incident from the web app

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Step 1

Go to Incidents > Maintenance and click Schedule Maintenance in the top-right corner.Clean Shot2025 11 18at16 09 01@2x Pn
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Step 2

Fill in the Maintenance Incident form. If you want to gather more details, the form can be completely customized in the Configuration > Forms section of the web application.Maintenance incident web form.The default Maintenance Incident form includes:
FieldContent
TitleTitle of the incident. This will be used to create the channel name along with today’s date.
SummaryA summary of the incident.
SeverityDefaults: Severity level from SEV3 to SEV0.
TypeThe type of incident. Defaults: Cloud, Security, Customer facing, Default.
ServicesThe service or services impacted.
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Step 3

Click Create Incident to save.Clean Shot2025 11 18at16 11 18@2x Pn

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Schedule a Maintenance Incident from Slack

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Step 1

Enter the Slack command /rootly maintenance. Press enter or click the paper plane icon to run the command and open the _maintenance incident _form.
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Step 2

Fill in the maintenance incident form. Scheduled for and Scheduled until dates and times are required.Maintenance incident Slack form.Most of the fields in the maintenance incident form can be customized and new fields can be added. If you want to gather more details, the form can be completely customized in the Configuration > Forms section of the web application.The default maintenance incident form includes:
FieldContent
TitleTitle of the incident. This will be used to create the channel name along with today’s date.
SummaryA summary of the incident.
SeverityDefaults: Severity level from SEV3 to SEV0.
TypeThe type of incident. Defaults: Cloud, Security, Customer facing, Default.
ServicesThe service or services impacted.
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Step 3

Click Schedule to save.New maintenance incident notification in Slack.The maintenance incident is now available in the Rootly web app. To manage the incident in Slack, select View in Rootly, then click the Slack icon under the incident title.

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Update a maintenance incident

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Change the status

Clean Shot2025 11 18at16 14 43@2x Pn Maintenance incidents can have the following statuses:
  • Planning
  • Scheduled
  • In Progress
  • Verifying
  • Completed
  • Cancelled
Change the status by clicking Incident Status in the top-right corner, or in Slack using the /rootly status command.

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Update details 

Click Edit in the top-right corner to update the incident. Default fields include:
FieldContent
Scheduled start and end timeThe planned time for the maintenance to take place.
TitleThe title of the maintenance incident. This will only be visible in the Rootly web app or the incident Slack channel (if applicable).
SeverityDefaults: Severity level from SEV3 to SEV0.
TypeThe type of incident. Defaults: Cloud, Security, Customer facing, Default.
ServicesThe service or services impacted.
EnvironmentsThe environment the incident will impact. E.g. Dev or Production.
FunctionalitiesSpecific functionalities impacted. E.g. Checkout or Search.
TeamsThe relevant teams involved in this maintenance incident.
The form can be edited from Configuration > Forms & Fields > Update Maintenance Incident.

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Assign Roles

Pre-assign roles to this maintenance incident by selecting “Assign Roles” under the incident title. Clean Shot2025 11 18at16 16 42@2x Pn

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Create a Slack channel

Select the Slack icon under the incident title to create a Slack channel for this maintenance incident. Clean Shot2025 11 18at16 16 59@2x Pn

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Publish your maintenance incident to a status page

Communicate your upcoming and active maintenance windows to your stakeholders through the Rootly Status Page. Navigate to your maintenance window, select the Status Page tab, then Publish Incident. Clean Shot2025 11 18at16 20 31@2x Pn Select the status page you’d like to publish an update to and fill in the subsequent information to include in the update. Rootly will automatically surface any Maintenance Windows at the top of the status page. Clean Shot2025 11 18at16 23 30@2x Pn Further, any services attached to your Maintenance Window will automatically be shown as **In Maintenance **if the update published to the status page is either In Progress or Verifying. Clean Shot2025 11 18at16 24 14@2x Pn
To give you full control over how maintenance windows are communicated to your stakeholder, Rootly will not automatically update your status page based on the maintenance incident’s current status: updates must be manually published to the status page.

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Building workflows for maintenance incidents

You can build automations for your Maintenance Incidents using Rootly’s Workflow builder. Follow the instructions to create a workflow in the linked documentation. To create a workflow specific to Mainenance Windows, ensure your workflow has a Kind condition set toScheduled Maintenance so that the workflow will only fire on your maintenance incidents. Clean Shot2025 11 18at16 30 08@2x Pn

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Converting a maintenance incident

Sometimes, unexpected complexity might occur during your maintenance incident, and it requires a regular incident to be declared. Rootly lets you convert an existing maintenance incident into a regular incident directly in Rootly Web, or via Slack.

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Converting to a regular incident on web

While viewing your Maintenance Incident on web, select (…), thenConvert to incident . Clean Shot2025 06 18at13 52 12@2x Pn Clicking on this button will trigger your Rootly Create Incident form, as well as a ‘Reason for conversion’ field for your commanders to fill out to give additional context for why the incident is being converted. The information provided in this field will be added to the incident’s timeline.

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Converting to a regular incident on Slack

To convert your maintenance incident on Slack, in your maintenance incident’s Slack channel use the /rootly convert maintenance command. Clean Shot2025 06 18at14 03 35@2x Pn This will trigger your Rootly Create Incident form, as well as a ‘Reason for conversion’ field for your commanders to fill out to give additional context for why the incident is being converted. The information provided in this field will be added to the incident’s timeline. Once your maintenance incident is converted to a regular incident, all of your related automations and workflows will trigger much like they do when a new incident is created.