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 notifying 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 keeps a silence from being forgotten and quietly masking real problems. Re-create one explicitly if you need it longer.

Where to find silences

Open Alerts → Silences. Silences are ad-hoc; for recurring quiet windows, use Maintenance Windows instead.

Silences are grouped into Active, Expired, and All tabs.

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 it expires).

Create a silence

Create a silence from the Silences page, an alert group, or an alert’s Pause Notifications.

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 and time, up to 30 days out.
4. Add a Reason describing why this silence exists.
5. Click Save.

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 binding to the group, so the silence stops automatically when the group resolves.

Save it; this creates a Group-bound silence.

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, and only its notifications are suppressed. While paused, the rule is marked Silenced; view or end the pause from Alerts → Silences. 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 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 recorded in the alert’s 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

From a row’s kebab menu, select End silence (or View). Ending an active silence removes suppression for matching alerts immediately; new firings notify as normal.

Related

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