The event muting feature allows you to control how Blue Matador creates events based on resources, projects, and monitors for a specified time.  Some use cases of event muting include:

Blue Matador’s monitors have automatically configured thresholds and settings that cannot generally be updated. When you want to purposely mute or hide events for specific resources, monitors, or periods of time, you can configure mute rules. You can access mute rules via Setup -> Mute Rules.

On the mute rules page you can view all of your active and inactive mute rules. A mute rule will show up in the active view if all of the following criteria are met:

Any rules which affect deleted resources, have a period that occurred in the past, or have been disabled will be inactive and will not affect future events.

Mute rules have two modes: Mute and Mute + Hide. An event that is muted will display in the Dashboard and Timeline views of the app, but will not cause notifications when they are created. An event that is muted and hidden will not display on the Dashboard at all, and is hidden in the Timeline by default. Hidden events can be displayed in the Timeline by selecting the Show Hidden option on the Timeline. This option only appears if there are hidden events within the time range and filters you have selected.

When an event is created, Blue Matador checks the affected resource and event type against any active mute rules in your account. Any matching rules are used to mark the event as muted. In accounts that use projects, the event will be muted if any of its projects match any of the projects in a mute rule. If both a Mute and a Mute + Hide rule match an event, the Mute + Hide rule will take precedence and the event will become hidden.

When an event becomes muted or hidden, it stays permanently muted or hidden for the life of the event. If you disable a rule, or the period of the rule passes, the affected events do not become un-muted or un-hidden. However, future events will always be evaluated using the active rules at the time the event is created.

If an event becomes muted or hidden after it has already created a notification to an incident management integration such as PagerDuty, OpsGenie, or VictorOps, the event will not resolve the related incident immediately in Pagerduty, OpsGenie, or VictorOps; it will still resolve the related incident in PagerDuty, OpsGenie, or VictorOps when the event itself resolves.

You can create a mute rule from the Mute Rules page. Mute rules can also be created from the Timeline or Atlas pages.  When creating a mute rule from the Mute Rules page, you must select the affected resources and monitors, specify the period of time the rule will be active, and decide whether matching events will be muted, or muted and hidden. 

1. Go to the Mute Rules page via Setup > Mute Rules

2. Click the Create Rule button to open the Mute Events modal

Click Choose Resources to open the resource selector

4. Click Done to finalize the resource selection

5. Click Select Monitors to open the monitor selector

6. Click Done to finalize the monitor selection

7. Click Specify Time to open the period selector

8. Then, select the muting mode

9. Finally, click Save to save the mute rule

Once a mute rule is created, it cannot be edited. We prevent editing because it is unclear what should happen to matching events when modifying an existing mute rule with respect to the period that has been specified. Instead, you can disable and clone a mute rule to get a different configuration.

Disabling a mute rule will cause future events matching that rule to no longer match. Those events may still become muted by matching other active rules. Currently muted or hidden events that were affected by the newly disabled rule will not be un-muted or un-hidden. Disabling cannot be undone, but a similar effect can be achieved by cloning a disabled rule.

You can disable an active mute rule using the dropdown menu next to each rule on the Mute Rules page.

Both active and inactive rules can be cloned. Cloning a mute rule will open up the Mute Events modal with information pre-filled from the source mute rule. The time period will be filled out with the source rule’s configuration, but the current time is used when deciding which events will match the period portion of the rule.

 You can clone an active or inactive mute rule using the dropdown menu next to each rule on the Mute Rules page.

Events can be muted directly from the Timeline view. When muting from the Timeline, the resource and event type options are automatically filled out with the values from the event, but can still be changed.

1. View your Timeline via Explore > Timeline

2. Select an event that you wish to mute to view the details pane

3. Click the Mute icon at the top of the details pane to open the mute modal

4. Configure the period and select the mute mode, then click Save

5. The affected events will now indicate that they are muted on the dashboard and timeline

Are currently open events modified when I create a mute rule? A mute rule will only modify current events if its period is set to Forever or For X hours.

What is the difference between mute and hide? When events are muted, notifications will not be created for them via Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, VictorOps, AWS SNS, Email, etc. When events are hidden, notifications will also not be created, and the events will not show up in the Dashboard or Timeline.

Does muting work with projects? The muting feature is fully compatible with projects. When configuring a mute rule using projects, an event with any projects matching any of the projects in the mute rule will be affected by the rule.