# Silences page

## Overview

The Silences page lists all Silences you and your team created for your Monitors. In this section, you can create and manage your Silence rules to suppress notifications and Issues noise for a specified period of time. Silences are a great way to reduce alert fatigue, which can lead to missing important issues, and help focus on the most critical issues during specific operational scenarios such as scheduled maintenances.

groundcover supports two types of silences:

* **One-time Silences** — Suppress alerts for a fixed time window. Useful for ad-hoc maintenance or known one-off events.
* **Recurring Silences** — Automatically suppress alerts on a repeating schedule (daily or weekly). Useful for planned maintenance windows, batch jobs, or any predictable operational period.

## Create a one-time Silence

Follow these simple steps to create a new one-time Silence.

<div data-with-frame="true"><figure><img src="/files/GN56G7v8RKykai5ynTSd" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div>

### Section 1: Schedule

Specify the timeframe for the silence rule. Note that the starting point doesn't have to be now, and can also be any time in the future.

Below the From / Until boxes, you'll see a Silence summary, showing its approximate length (rounded down to full days) and starting date.

### Section 2: Matchers

Define the criteria for Monitors or Issues to be silenced.

1. Click **Add Matcher** to specify match conditions (e.g., cluster, namespace, span\_name).
2. Combine multiple matchers for more granular control.

**Example:** Silence all Monitors in the "demo" namespace.

### Section 3: Comment

Add notes or context for the Silence rule. These comments help you and other users understand the purpose of the rule.

### Section 4: Affected Active Issues

Preview the issues currently affected by the Silence rule, based on any defined Matchers. This list contains only actively firing Issues.

**Tip:** Use this preview to see the list of impacted issues and adjust your Matchers before finishing to create the Silence.

## Recurring Silences

Recurring Silences let you define alert suppression rules that repeat on a schedule. Instead of manually creating a new silence before every maintenance window, you configure the recurrence pattern once and groundcover automatically creates silence instances at the right times.

### How it works

When you create a recurring silence, you define:

1. **Recurrence type** — How often the silence repeats (daily or weekly)
2. **Timeframes** — The specific time windows during which alerts should be silenced
3. **Timezone** — The timezone in which the schedule is evaluated
4. **Matchers** — Which alerts to silence (same matcher system as one-time silences)

groundcover evaluates your recurring silence rules in the background and automatically creates one-time silence instances when a scheduled window is approaching. These instances appear on the Silences page alongside manually created silences, with a **\[recurring]** prefix in their comment to indicate they were generated automatically.

### Create a Recurring Silence

To create a new Recurring Silence, open the Silences page and select the **Recurring** silence type.

#### Recurrence type

Choose how often the silence should repeat:

| Recurrence type | Description                             | Timeframe keys                                                               |
| --------------- | --------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Daily**       | Repeats every day at the specified time | `every_day`                                                                  |
| **Weekly**      | Repeats on selected days of the week    | `monday`, `tuesday`, `wednesday`, `thursday`, `friday`, `saturday`, `sunday` |

#### Timeframes

For each recurrence type, define one or more time windows using **start time** and **end time** in `HH:MM` format (24-hour clock).

**Key behaviors:**

* **Start time must be before end time** — Each time range must have `startTime < endTime`. The one exception is `00:00` to `00:00`, which represents a full day.
* **Overnight windows** — Overnight windows are not supported as a single time range. To cover an overnight period (e.g., 10 PM to 6 AM), split it into two ranges: `22:00–00:00` and `00:00–06:00`.
* **Multiple windows per day** — You can define more than one time range for the same day. This is especially useful for overnight windows that need to be split.
* **All-day window** — Use `00:00` to `00:00` to silence for the entire day.
* **Weekly selections** — For weekly recurrence, select one or more days and define time windows for each. Different days can have different time windows.

#### Timezone

All time windows are interpreted in a specific timezone, including handling of daylight saving time (DST) transitions.

* **Via the UI** — The timezone is automatically set to the local timezone of the user creating the silence.
* **Via the API** — The timezone is provided as an explicit input using an IANA timezone name (e.g. `America/New_York`, `UTC`, `Asia/Jerusalem`). See the [Recurring Silences API](/use-groundcover/remote-access-and-apis/api-examples/recurring-silences-api.md) for details.

#### Matchers

Matchers work the same way as one-time silences. Define which alerts should be suppressed when the recurring silence is active.

1. Click **Add Matcher** to specify match conditions.
2. Each matcher has a **name** (label key), a **value**, and a **match type**:
   * `=` — Equals
   * `!=` — Not equals
   * `=~` — Matches regex
   * `!~` — Does not match regex
3. Combine multiple matchers for precise targeting.

#### Comment

Add a description to help your team understand the purpose of this recurring silence (e.g., "Weekly database maintenance window"). If left empty, a default comment is added with the created timestamp.

### Managing Recurring Silences

Recurring silences appear in the Silences page alongside one-time silences. From there you can:

* **Edit** — Modify the schedule, matchers, timezone, or comment of an existing recurring silence.
* **Delete** — Remove a recurring silence. Any future silence instances that haven't started yet are also removed.

{% hint style="info" %}
Editing a recurring silence takes effect on the next scheduled window. Silence instances that are already active are not affected by the change.
{% endhint %}

### Example use cases

#### Weekly maintenance window

Suppress alerts every Sunday night from 10 PM to Monday 6 AM for your production cluster. Since overnight windows must be split, this uses two ranges across Sunday and Monday:

```
Recurrence type: Weekly
Timeframes:
  monday: 00:00 – 06:00
  sunday: 22:00 – 00:00
Timezone: America/New_York
Matchers:
  cluster = "production"
```

#### Daily nightly silence

Suppress alerts every night from 8 PM to 8 AM using two time windows:

```
Recurrence type: Daily
Timeframes:
  every_day: 20:00 – 00:00, 00:00 – 08:00
Timezone: UTC
Matchers:
  namespace = "etl"
```

#### Weekend silence for non-critical alerts

Reduce noise from low-severity alerts during weekends:

```
Recurrence type: Weekly
Timeframes:
  saturday: 00:00 – 00:00
  sunday:   00:00 – 00:00
Timezone: Asia/Jerusalem
Matchers:
  severity = "S4"
```

{% hint style="info" %}
`00:00 – 00:00` represents a full-day window.
{% endhint %}


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