SCOM 2016 - Creating Maintenance Mode Schedules

Firstly, this shall be short, but sweet. I won’t delve too deep. There’s already an entire bible, okay maybe half, on the subject. Find the authoritative Maintenance mode guide from Microsoft.

Maintenance mode in SCOM enables you to avoid any alerts or errors that might occur when a monitored object, such as a computer, database, cluster, etc. is taken offline for maintenance. Maintenance mode suspends the following features: (SOURCE: TechNet)

Rules and monitors
Notifications
Automatic responses
State changes
New alerts

SCOM 2016 extends the on-demand placement of monitored objects into maintenance mode that existed in previous versions of SCOM, and provides you with the ability to define schedules aligned with your service or maintenance windows, and automatically place monitored objects into maintenance mode at a future time of your choosing. With this new capability, you can now: (SOURCE: TechNet)

Schedule maintenance mode at a future time daily, weekly, or monthly.
Choose different classes of entities and groups to put to maintenance as a part of a single schedule.
View all the maintenance mode schedules from a single screen.
Schedule multiple jobs for the same monitored entity.

If after reading the article 10 times, you still can’t find the Maintenance Schedules option referenced in the article, don’t gouge your eyes, have faith!

Create a maintenance schedule.

Log on to the computer with an account that is a member of the Operations Manager Administrators role.
In the Operations console, click Administration.
In the Administration workspace, Select Device Management, right click and select Create Maintenance Schedules.
From the Tasks pane click Create Maintenance Schedule.
In the Create Maintenance Schedule wizard, on the Object Selection page, click Add/Remove objects… and the Create Group Wizard – Object Selection dialog box appears.
In the Create Group Wizard – Object Selection dialog box, perform the following:
1. In the Search for list, the default item Computer is selected. Alternatively, you can select Computer Group or a specific class such as SQL Server 2012 DB Engine from the drop-down list.
2. Optionally, in the Filter by part of the name box, type all or part of the object name, and then click Search.
3. In the Available items box, select the desired objects, click Add, and then click OK.
On the Object Selection page, click Next.
In the Create Maintenance Schedule wizard, on the Schedule page, you can specify the following for your maintenance schedule:
1. Choose the frequency as to how often you would like it to run. If you select the option Once, the task will only run one time based on the start date and time selected.
2. Under Duration select the Start Time and for End Time, select the number of minutes or select and enter the Specific end time.
3. Under Schedule is effective beginning, specify when this schedule is allowed to take effect and if you require it to no longer be valid after a period of time, click the option The schedule expires on and select a future expiration date. Note: The minimum value for Number of minutes is 5. The maximum value is 1,051,200 (2 years).
Click Next once you have completed configuring the schedule options.
In the Create Maintenance Schedule wizard, on the Details page, specify the following:
1. Create a name for the schedule in the Schedule Name box.
2. Select Planned if this is a planned event; otherwise, leave it cleared.
3. In the Category list, click the appropriate maintenance category.
4. Select Enable Schedule if you want to enable the schedule now, or clear it if you plan on enabling the schedule later.
Click Finish to save your changes.

The new schedule will appear in the list of maintenance schedules and you can edit, disable, or delete a maintenance schedule from the list. This can be accomplished by selecting the schedule from the list and choosing the corresponding option from the Tasks pane.