Silences

A Silence suppresses notifications for alerts whose labels match the silence’s matchers, for a bounded time window. Use silences when you know an alert will be noisy and you don’t want it paging anyone — a deployment expected to spike error rates, a known third-party outage, or a maintenance window you can’t fully scope.

Silences cap at 30 days. The cap exists so silences don’t get forgotten about and quietly mask real problems — re-create one explicitly if you need it longer.

Where to find silences

Open Alerts → Silences in the left navigation. Silences are ad-hoc — for recurring quiet windows use Maintenance Windows instead.

The list has three tabs with live counts: Active (N) (default), Expired (N), and All (N). Columns: Matchers (chips, with overflow tooltip), Expires (countdown like e.g. “In 4h” or “Expired 12m ago”), Scope (a Standalone or Group-bound chip), Reason, Created by.

Anatomy of a silence

Field	What it does
Matchers	Label conditions that pick which alerts the silence applies to. Same operator set as Routing Rules: Equals, Not equals, Matches regex, Doesn’t match regex.
Expires at	Date and time the silence stops. Capped at 30 days from creation.
Reason	Free-form text — recommended so others know why the silence exists.
Scope	Either Group-bound (auto-expires when a specific Alert Group resolves) or Standalone (lives until its expires_at).

Create a silence

There are a few ways to create a silence:

From Alerts → Silences

1. Open Alerts → Silences and click New silence.
2. Add one or more matcher rows. For each: pick a label key, an operator, and a value.
3. Pick an Expires at date/time. The form caps duration at 30 days and disables submit otherwise.
4. Add a Reason describing why this silence exists.
5. Click Save. The silence appears in the Active tab.

From an Alert Group

On any Alert Group detail page, click Silence this group. The silence creator opens pre-filled with:

• The group’s labels populated as matchers.
• A hidden auto_expire_group_id set to the current group, so the silence stops automatically when the group resolves.
• A banner above the form reads e.g. “This silence will auto-expire when group <title> resolves.”

Save it from here. The silence shows up as Group-bound on the list.

From an alert’s Pause Notifications

On an alert rule’s more options (⋯) → Pause Notifications, KloudMate creates a silence scoped to that alert (an alarm_id matcher) with an expiry — the alert keeps evaluating, only its notifications are suppressed. While paused, the rule is marked Silenced on the alerts list and its detail page, and the silence appears here in the Active tab, where you view or end it. Add matchers to narrow the pause to specific instances.

Silence vs. maintenance window

Both features are a notification gate, not a state change — the alert still evaluates on its schedule and its state transitions are still recorded in history; only the notification is withheld. Silencing every firing instance of an alert group keeps the group Open (shown as Muted) — it does not resolve the group, and muting never emits a resolved notification. The differences between the two are operational, not behavioral:

• Silences are ad-hoc, label-matcher driven, capped at 30 days, and can be auto-bound to a specific alert group so they expire when the group resolves.
• Maintenance Windows are scheduled — one-time (RFC3339 start/end) or recurring (DAILY / WEEKLY / MONTHLY with a timezone-aware time-of-day).

Both use the same four label-matcher operators — Equals, Not equals, Matches regex, Doesn’t match regex — matched against alert rule labels and alert instance labels.

Both leave the alert evaluating. Suppressed state transitions are marked with silenced_at and silenced_by_* columns visible on the alert state history, so you can always tell after the fact whether a quiet stretch was a real recovery or a suppressed notification.

Pick a silence for a reactive, one-off suppression you’ll re-evaluate within 30 days. Pick a Maintenance Window for planned downtime, recurring quiet hours, or anything that needs a calendar schedule.

Viewing and ending a silence

Each row’s kebab menu has View and End silence. Ending an active silence removes suppression for matching alerts immediately — new firings notify as normal.

Related

• Alert Groups — Silence-this-group action.
• Maintenance Windows — scheduled, recurring counterpart to silences.
• Routing Rules — same matcher model.