Blackouts and Notification Blackouts

Blackouts allow you to support planned outage periods to perform scheduled or emergency maintenance. When a target is put under blackout, monitoring is suspended, thus preventing unnecessary alerts from being sent when you bring down a target for scheduled maintenance operations such as database backup or hardware upgrade. Blackout periods are automatically excluded when calculating a target's overall availability.

A blackout period can be defined for individual targets, a group of targets or for all targets on a host. The blackout can be scheduled to run immediately or in the future, and to run indefinitely or stop after a specific duration. Blackouts can be created on an as-needed basis, or scheduled to run at regular intervals. If, during the maintenance period, you discover that you need more (or less) time to complete maintenance tasks, you can easily extend (or stop) the blackout that is currently in effect. Blackout functionality is available from both the Enterprise Manager console as well as via the Enterprise Manager command-line interface (EM CLI). EM CLI is often useful for administrators who would like to incorporate the blacking out of a target within their maintenance scripts. When a blackout ends, the Management Agent automatically re-evaluates all metrics for the target to provide current status of the target post-blackout.

If an administrator inadvertently performs scheduled maintenance on a target without first putting the target under blackout, these periods would be reflected as target downtime instead of planned blackout periods. This has an adverse impact on the target's availability records. In such cases, Enterprise Manager allows Super Administrators to go back and define the blackout period that should have happened at that time. The ability to create these retroactive blackouts provides Super Administrators with the flexibility to define a more accurate picture of target availability.

Notification Blackouts

Beginning with Enterprise Manager 13c, you can stop notifications only. These are called Notification Blackouts and are intended solely for suppressing event notifications on targets. Because the Agent continues to monitor the target during the Notification Blackout duration, the OMS will continue to show the actual target status along with an indication that the target is currently under Notification Blackout.