We want to know about problems as soon as possible, always. Well, not always—there are those cases when we test failover or reconfigure storage arrays. There is also maintenance—the time when things are highly likely to break and we do not want to send loads of emails, SMS messages, or other things to our accounts or to other people. Zabbix offers host group and host-level maintenance that enables us to avoid excessive messaging during such maintenance periods.

Hosts being under maintenance can result in three main consequences:

• Data is not collected for those hosts
• Problems for those hosts are hidden or not shown in the frontend
• Alerts are not processed for those hosts

These consequences can also be customized in quite some detail per host group, host, and other factors. We will explore most of those customization possibilities in this chapter, except alert processing, which we will discuss in Chapter 7, Acting upon Monitored Conditions.