Notification Blackouts are solely for suppressing the notifications on targets during the Notification Blackout duration. The Agent continues to monitor the target under Notification Blackout and the OMS will show the actual target status along with an indication that the target is currently under Notification Blackout. Events will be generated as usual during a Notification Blackout. Only the event notifications are suppressed.

The period of time under which the target is in Notification Blackout is not used to calculate the target's Service Level Agreement (SLA).

To place a target under Notification Blackout, you need to have at least Blackout Target privilege on the target.

There are two types of Notification Blackouts:

• Maintenance Notification Blackout: The target is under a planned maintenance and administrators do not want to receive any notifications during this period. Since the target is brought down deliberately for maintenance purposes, the Notification Blackout duration should not be considered while calculating the availability percentage and SLA. In this scenario, an administrator should create a maintenance Notification Blackout.

• Notification-only Notification Blackout: The target is experiencing an unexpected down time such as a server crash. While the administrator is fixing the server, they do not want to receive alerts as they are already aware of the issue and are currently working to resolve it. However, the availability percentage computation should consider the actual target status of the Notification Blackout duration and the SLA should be computed accordingly. In this scenario, the administrator should create a Notification-only Notification Blackout.

By default, when a Notification Blackout is created, it is a maintenance Notification Blackout (the Under Maintenance option will be selected by default and the administrator will need to select the Non-maintenance option in order to create a regular Notification-only Notification Blackout.

A Notification Blackout can be defined for individual target(s), a group of multiple targets that reside on different hosts, or for all targets on a host. The Notification Blackout can be scheduled to run immediately or in the future, or stop after a specific duration. Notification Blackouts can be created on an as-needed basis, or scheduled to run at regular intervals. If, during the maintenance period, the administrator discovers that he needs more (or less) time to complete his maintenance tasks, he can easily extend (or stop) the Notification Blackout that is currently in effect. Notification Blackout functionality is available from both the Enterprise Manager console as well as via the Enterprise Manager command-line interface (EMCLI). EMCLI is often useful for administrators who would like to incorporate the blacking out of a target within their maintenance scripts.

Notification Blackout Access

Enterprise Manager administrators that have at least Blackout Target privileges on all Selected Targets in a Notification Blackout will be able to create, edit, stop, or delete the Notification Blackout.

In case an administrator has at least Blackout Target privileges on all Selected Targets (targets directly added to the Notification Blackout), but does not have Blackout Target privileges on some or all of the Dependent Targets, then that administrator will be able to edit, stop, or delete the Notification Blackout.