Planned outages are strategically scheduled times when services are unavailable in order to perform changes, upgrades, maintenance and repairs.
Planned outages often occur between the hours of 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. This standardized time period, where enterprise technology activity is generally at low levels, is known as a "maintenance window". The purpose of having a standard maintenance window is to allow you to prepare for possible disruption or change.
DoTS takes campus events into account when scheduling planned outages. We typically do not schedule them during registration, the first or last weeks of a term, finals, grading periods, or other significant campus events/dates.
DoTS communicates planned outages to the campus outages email list. Outages also appear on the DoTS website. (You can subscribe to campus-outages@lists.uwrf.edu from the Service Outage web page.)
Benefits
- Improves reliability and performance of services
- Reduces the chance of a major incident (unplanned outage) occurring, which seem to happen at inopportune times
- Scheduled to cause as little inconvenience as possible and few are likely to notice
- Communicated so that you can better plan around the outage