Maintenance Calendar
Shows when every host you can reach is due for its monthly OS patching, on a calendar — including the windows that have been skipped, moved or re-timed through Maintenance Windows.
Primary use: Answering “when is this server next going down?” without asking anyone, and planning around it. Project managers and developers get the same view the DevOps team has.
This covers web application servers as well as FileMaker ones. If your team’s servers are not FileMaker, this calendar and Maintenance Windows are what the portal is for you — the other tools are FileMaker-specific and are hidden from you.
You can read it in the portal, or subscribe to it from Calendar on your Mac so the windows sit alongside the rest of your week.
This replaces the shared calendar that a script used to publish. That calendar was a snapshot: it went stale as soon as a window changed, and nothing about a reschedule reached it unless someone re-ran the script and re-uploaded the file. This one is generated when you look at it, so it is never behind.
Reading the calendar
Tools → Maintenance Calendar. The current month opens by default; the arrows move a month at a time, and Today comes back. The Client dropdown narrows to one client’s hosts, which is worth doing if you can see a lot of them.
Each entry is a host and the time its window starts. The colour down the left says what kind of window it is:
| Meaning | |
|---|---|
| Scheduled | The host’s normal window. Patching and a reboot happen at the time shown. |
| Skipped | Struck through. No patching that month; it resumes by itself at the next window. |
| Moved away | Struck through. The window was here, and has been moved — look for the moved here entry on its new date. |
| Moved here | Where a moved window is actually being patched. |
| Re-timed | Same day as always, at a different hour. |
A busy day collapses to +N more; click it to see the rest.
All times are Pacific. Unlike the rest of the portal, this page does not follow the timezone selector in the navbar — a window shown in your own timezone could belong to a different day than the square it sits in, which is a bad way to read a calendar. Subscribe if you want the windows in local time; a calendar app converts them properly.
If a host you expect is missing, look under Hosts with no windows shown below the grid. Most often it has no patching schedule in AWX at all, which is normal for some hosts.
Standby servers do appear, marked with a pause icon — they are still patched every month, so the calendar still has something to tell you about them.
If a host is missing from the grid and from that list, it has no server record in the portal at all. Nothing on the page can account for that one; ask the DevOps team to run check_calendar_expansion, which is the report that finds them.
Subscribing in Calendar
At the bottom of the page is a URL for your own feed. The calendar arrives named **
- In Calendar on a Mac: File → New Calendar Subscription.
- Paste the URL, click Subscribe.
- Set Auto-refresh to Every hour or less, and untick Remove alerts if you want the descriptions.
In Google Calendar it is Other calendars → From URL.
Subscribing keeps a live link, so windows update by themselves as they are skipped, moved or re-timed. Do not download the file and import it instead — an import copies the events in once and then goes stale, which is the problem this replaces.
A skipped window stays on the calendar marked as cancelled rather than disappearing, so you can see that the skip took effect.
Your feed URL is a password. Anyone you send it to can read your maintenance calendar. It shows only the hosts you can access and follows your access if that changes, but it does not expire. If it gets out, use Reset URL on the calendar page — that issues a new one and immediately stops the old one working, so you will need to re-subscribe.
How often it updates
Three separate things, and only one of them is under your control:
| When it updates | |
|---|---|
| The calendar page in the portal | Every time you load it. A window you skip, move or re-time shows immediately. |
| A change made to a host’s schedule in AWX | Within 15 minutes on the portal page. The portal caches each host’s patching schedule for that long rather than asking AWX on every page load. |
| Your subscribed calendar app | Whenever it decides to refresh. |
That last one is the one to set deliberately. The portal cannot push to your calendar app — the app polls the URL on its own schedule. The feed asks to be refreshed hourly, but that is only a hint and clients treat it inconsistently; the Auto-refresh setting on the subscription is what actually decides. If it is left on a long interval, a window that moves today could show the old date for days.
So: set Auto-refresh to Every hour or less when you subscribe, and if you need to see a change right now, look at the calendar page in the portal — that is always current — or refresh the subscription by hand (right-click the calendar → Refresh).
Rule of thumb: a skip or move you file reaches subscribers within one refresh interval; a change to a host’s underlying schedule can take that plus 15 minutes.
Changing a window
The calendar is read-only. To skip, move or re-time a window, use Skip or move a window at the top of the page, which is the Maintenance Windows flow. Any change you make there shows on the calendar straight away, and reaches your subscribed calendar at its next refresh.