Downtime planning 

Identify maintenance tasks that require specific services to be unavailable or partially unavailable. 

Some maintenance and upgrades can occur seamlessly to users, while others require interruption of service. When possible, schedule with users those maintenance activities that require downtime, allowing the users to plan for the downtime. 

Usage patterns 

Identify the usage patterns to determine the best time to schedule maintenance. 

For example, on systems where peak usage is during normal business hours, schedule maintenance in the evening or weekends. For geographically distributed systems, identifying these times can be more challenging. 

Availability 

Serviceability is often a reflection of your availability design. Strategies for minimizing downtime for maintenance and upgrades revolve around your availability strategy. Systems that require a high degree of availability have limited opportunities for maintenance, upgrades, and repair. 

Strategies for handling availability requirements affect how you handle maintenance and upgrades. For example, on systems that are distributed geographically, servicing can depend on the ability to route workloads to remote servers during maintenance periods. 

Also, systems requiring a high degree of availability might require more sophisticated solutions that automate restarting of systems with little human intervention. 

Diagnostics and monitoring 

You can improve the stability of a system by regularly running diagnostic and monitoring tools to identify problem areas. 

Regular monitoring of a system can avoid problems before they occur, help balance workloads according to availability strategies, and improve planning for maintenance and downtime.