How do you manage cancelled maintenance?

[Nick Coates]

👋 Hey folks! At Symantec, we have 13 Statuspages for our various cloud products (yeah, a lot of pages but it's worked incredibly well). I've recently been discussing with the team on how we should effectively manage cancelled maintenance, after several customers reported that the posts were unclear.

So, I'm intrigued in how companies who use Statuspage would manage cancelled maintenances, and whether there should be some functionality to enable us to do this.

Here are a couple of thoughts:

• Update the scheduled maintenance post with a message about this being cancelled; send the update; and then delete the post
• Update the scheduled maintenance post with a message about this being cancelled; change the title be prefixed with [CANCELLED]; and set the end time from 1 minute and the end date today.
• Statuspage should have the ability to allow us to cancel maintenance; sends out an update which is displayed as CANCELLED rather than Completed in the post page; and moves the maintenance to the history page

Are there other ways? Would the best way be for Atlassian to add this functionality?

Thanks,
Nick

[Laurent Dinard]

Hello,

I have the same question. Idially, this cancellation operation is productized in statuspage.io. Any update on the question above?

Laurent

[Mathias Mittmann]

I'm currently facing the same issue. There needs to be a clean way to cancel a scheduled maintenance. As mentioned in the other posts, setting it to completed will confuse users.

Thanks
Mathias

[Victor_OC]

I realize that this is an older post, but it's still an issue.  I'm one of those Symantec customers that is very confused about the posts, particularly the most recent ones where maintenance has been rescheduled several times.  It's very difficult to tell if the maintenance is the same but rescheduled or a different maintenance with the same or almost the same name.  The same goes with incidents where occasionally there may be more than one incident happening at the same time or a similar incident as the day before.

One thing I would like to suggest that will help in determining if posts are related is to assign numbers to them (e.g., MAINT##### for maintenance and INC##### for Incidents).  Then, if maintenance is postponed, it can either continue to use the same number or at least reference the previous number.  To make it easier, it can follow internal numbering.  (I'm sure each maintenance item and Incident are assigned some internal tracking number.)

To address the original post, I don't think posts should ever be deleted.  I like the third option where Statuspage adds the ability to cancel maintenance (and postpone).  Barring that, I like the idea of prefixing the title with [CANCELLED] or [POSTPONED], including when sending out the updates.  (It is a bit confusing the first time you see "Completed" or "Maintenance complete", then get a new "scheduled" notice just before or after for the same thing on a different date.  When looking at the update quickly, you tend to miss the "rescheduled" part.)

Thanks,

Victor

[Nick Coates]

Hi @Victor_OC , Nick from the Broadcom team here and am responsible for incident comms platform. 

I've shared your feedback with the team and we will be testing appending [CANCELLED] and [RESCHEDULED] to the incident posts on a few of our pages with the intent to further roll this out across all pages. We really appreciate your feedback so thank you for making this suggestion.

I will be continue working with Atlassian on an enhancement to make cancelled and rescheduling a lot easier to manager.

Many thanks,
Nick Coates
Product Owner - Service Status, Broadcom Inc.

[Troy Dunton]

Just ran across this thread because we have the same issue. I would also love to see a [CANCELLED] or [RESCHEDULED] status option, especially for cancellation. At least for rescheduled, we can change the time and post an update to the existing maintenance event.

[Annabelle Fontinha]

Hi everyone, 

I am interested in the ticket number related to the enhancement so that I can vote for it :-)

Thank you

[Ren]

This feature would be so useful. Any update or Bug that we can track as Annabelle mentioned above?

[b1airo]

This feels like such an obvious and basic missing feature, reported almost two years ago. I'm left wondering if there is any active development on Statuspage now or whether this is going to end up like some of the embarrassingly old Zendesk forum pages with people complaining about basic functionality (e.g. updates sidebar) being completely useless

[Jonathan Leung]

Has there been any update on this enhancement?  Seems like it was being tested over 2 years ago,

Posting an update and then deleting is not a good approach, as the broken link and missing visibility creates confusion.

Posting an update indicating it has been cancelled seems to be the best path (presently), but the "completed" messaging creates confusion, as does the [Scheduled] tag in the history page.

[Shehryar Khan]

Is anybody in Atlassian looking at this request? Seems like a glaring miss.

[Christine Virata-Stone]

Is there any update on this topic? I'd like to know as well if there are plans to add managing cancelled maintenances to StatusPage.

[Paul Bondoc]

Just chiming in that this is still an issue.  I'm no UI expert but my suggestion would be to just add two additional status selections to be able to send notifications titled with "Rescheduled" or "Cancelled".  Out of the 4 maintenance statuses, none of those makes sense for cancellations.

[Jeanne Schock]

Why am I not surprised to see no response for what looks like 4 years. Has anyone come up with a workaround for this huge miss?

[Katherine Allan]

Adding another vote for this - when we need to postpone a scheduled maintenance on our managed platforms, it's generally either the developers have run into an issue in the test environment, or a team upstream of us in the product pipeline needs more time,  so it's often a while before we know when we can reschedule to. A maintenance status of postponed and/or cancelled would be immensely helpful. In the meantime the interim suggestions of editing the maintenance title are very helpful 👍