What is the purpose of 'maintenance windows' in PagerDuty?

The purpose of maintenance windows in PagerDuty is to prevent false alarms during planned maintenance or downtimes. Maintenance windows are utilized to indicate periods when services are intentionally taken offline for maintenance or updates. During these times, systems may not operate normally, potentially leading to incidents being triggered. By configuring a maintenance window, PagerDuty avoids alerting responders about issues that are already known and scheduled for resolution during maintenance, thereby streamlining the incident management process and reducing unnecessary alerts. This helps teams focus their efforts on actual incidents rather than dealing with false alarms resulting from scheduled downtime.