fleet/articles/using-maintenance-windows.md

Using maintenance windows (Fleet in your calendar)

Fleet helps end users fix issues on their own by scheduling a maintenance window directly on their calendar—no IT ticket required.

When a host fails a policy (e.g. MDM enrollment profile expired, disk encryption disabled, outdated software), Fleet can notify the user via a Google Calendar event. The event includes:

• What’s wrong (based on policy description)
• What to do (from the policy resolution field)
• A scheduled time (next available slot on Tuesday, 9–5 local time)

The user can reschedule if needed—Fleet will respect the new time and run the remediation then.

You can customize these flows with a webhook (e.g. Tines) to run scripts, use the Fleet API, or call MDM commands.

🔜 Auto-remediation for patching (OS updates, software) is coming soon.

Setup

1. Connect a Google Workspace service account to Fleet under Settings > Integrations > Calendars.
2. Create a webhook to handle the remediation (see Fleet + Tines guide).
3. In the Policies tab, click Manage automations > Calendar events, enable the feature, and paste your webhook URL.

End user experience

• If a host has multiple users listed in host vitals, such as an IdP user and one or more Google Chrome profiles, Fleet schedules the calendar event for the first user in alphabetical order.

Example: if the CEO's Executive Assistant (EA) is logged into Google Chrome with two profiles—their own (assistant@example.com) and the CEO's (ceo@example.com)—Fleet schedules the calendar event for the first profile in alphabetical order. In this case, the CEO would receive the calendar event for the EA's maintenance window.

• If a user is associated with multiple failing hosts, Fleet schedules only one calendar event at a time. After the first host is fixed, Fleet schedules the next event.
• Users can reschedule the event on their calendar—Fleet will run remediation at the new time.
• If a user moves the event to before the current time, Fleet shifts it to the next day.
• If a user deletes the event, Fleet automatically reschedules it for the next day.
• Fleet monitors calendar changes in real time (reschedules within ~30 seconds), but only for events in the upcoming week. Events further out are updated within 30 minutes.

What happens when a policy fails?

1. A calendar event is scheduled for the user who owns the host.
2. Fleet waits for the scheduled time, then calls the webhook with host + failure details.

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For more info:

• Fleet maintenance windows overview
• How it works under the hood (video)