The system will temporarily shut down for scheduled maintenance on June 11 (Tue.)

Thank you very much for using Mackerel.

We would like to inform you of some planned maintenance work that we will be carrying out as outlined below, causing the temporary suspension of our systems. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you, and thank you for your kind understanding.

Planned Maintenance Work

June 11, 2024 (Tue.) 1pm to 4pm (JST).
Our systems will be temporarily suspended during the hours outlined above.
The above is the longest case. The system will resume as soon as the maintenance is completed.
As we are carrying out some database maintenance work, this time period will also include the time required to perform any necessary database rollbacks if any issues are encountered. If the maintenance work is completed smoothly, we would expect to finish the work earlier than planned.

Maintenance Work Details

Upgrade PostgreSQL used by Mackerel.

Affected Systems on the Day

The maintenance work finish time will be the latest expected finishing time. If the actual maintenance work is completed earlier, our systems will be restarted at the earlier time.
- Once the maintenance work is started, all Mackerel systems will be stopped for a short period of time.
Mackerel web access, mackerel-agent data submissions, API access (including the CLI tool), alert notifications, etc. will become unavailable.
We will notify you once the maintenance work has been completed and all systems have been tested.
During the maintenance period, metric data submissions made by mackerel-agents will be buffered temporarily by the mackerel-agent itself. The data will be resent again once the maintenance work is complete.
- If the data is sent successfully, graphs will also be displayed for the time period of the maintenance work.
- Please note that restarting or pausing a mackerel-agent before the data is resent will cause it to lose all its buffered data.
- Starting up a mackerel-agent during the maintenance period will fail, as all communications with the main Mackerel system will be blocked.
- During the maintenance period, all data sent to Mackerel will fail. Error messages to this effect will be output to the error logs.
- If any metrics were to exceed a set threshold during the maintenance period, this will not cause the alerts to be triggered after the maintenance work has been completed.
- Any check monitors that detect any problems during the maintenance period will trigger alerts after the data is resent for up to 6h prior.
External monitoring or cloud integration graphs may have missing data corresponding to the maintenance period.
Post of labeled metrics by the OpenTelemetry Collector is not buffered, but it is possible to use the metric submission retry setting to repost metrics that fail to post.
- Please note that restarting or stopping the OpenTelemetry Collector before the metric post is complete will result in the loss of data held for metric post.
- OpenTelemetry Collector can be started during maintenance, but fails to post metrics to Mackerel.
- During the maintenance period, all data sent to Mackerel will fail. Error messages to this effect will be output to the error logs.
- If any metrics were to exceed a set threshold during the maintenance period, this will not cause the alerts to be triggered after the maintenance work has been completed.

Reasons for Scheduling the Maintenance Work as Above

Mackerel is a systems monitoring service. Hence, rather than stopping our monitoring services late at night or outside business hours, we decided that it would be better for our users to continue performing their own manual monitoring during the daytime as part of their normal working hours. This is why the decision was made to set the maintenance window to daytime (Japan time) on a weekday.

On the other hand, we do appreciate that this would cause difficulty to customers using Mackerel as a server monitoring service, in terms of operating the servers or deploying applications during the daytime. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience.

We appreciate that it is prudent for us to take into consideration our customers opinions with regard to our maintenance work periods, so we will definitely endeavor to make improvements in the future. Please contact us with your feedback if you would like to share your views.