Event Muting
Thomas Steele avatar
Written by Thomas Steele
Updated over a week ago

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:

  • Silencing notifications for a few hours when working on production

  • Hiding events for your dev environment permanently

  • Scheduling recurring maintenance windows

  • Hiding a specific event on a specific resource

Mute Rules

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:

  • The resource(s) for the rule is still active in your account

  • The period for the rule is either forever, currently in progress, or scheduled in the future

  • The rule has not been disabled

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.

How Muting Works

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.

Creating a Mute Rule

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

  • If your account has projects set up, you can use the projects dropdown to select which projects will be affected by the rule

  • Selecting All Resources means the rule will affect every current and future resource in your account

4. Click Done to finalize the resource selection

5. Click Select Monitors to open the monitor selector

  • If you select All Monitors, then all current and future Blue Matador monitors will be affected

  • If you select the check box next to a service name, then all current and future monitors for that service will be affected

  • You can expand one of the services to select specific monitors that will be affected in each service

6. Click Done to finalize the monitor selection

7. Click Specify Time to open the period selector

  • If you select Forever, then the rule will apply until it is disabled. Currently open events matching the resources and monitor selections will also be affected

  • If you select For X hours, then the rule will apply for a limited amount of hours starting when the rule is saved. Currently open events matching the resources and monitor selections will also be affected

  • You may also schedule the period in the future. Using this method, use the date and time picker to specify the time range of the first occurrence. If this period should repeat, then check the box and specify the value for Repeat every X days. Currently open events will not be affected by a rule created using a scheduled period, regardless of the repeat setting.

8. Then, select the muting mode

  • Mute means that events will be created normally, appear in the Dashboard and Timeline, but will not cause notifications through your notification integrations

  • Mute + Hide means that the events will be created as hidden, which means they will not appear in the Dashboard, and do not appear in the timeline by default. They will also not cause notifications through your notification integrations

  • When specifying resources using projects, events will be muted/hidden for those projects, but may still cause notifications and appear in the Dashboard if the event resource belongs to multiple projects and is not muted/hidden for every project it belongs to.

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

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.

Cloning a Mute Rule

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.

Muting in the Timeline

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

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Did this answer your question?