We are facing the following situation:

Our company has hundreds of retail sites around the world. We’re doing network monitoring for those sites. Many of these sites do NOT have power during the night and therefor they are not reachable.
Of course, we don’t want to have notifications during that period or tickets for a known recurring situation!

We started with notification period settings to send notifications only during the time, when the retail stores should be open. That works fine, BUT during downtime, they still appear as critical and/or unknown in the resource monitor. This makes the resource monitor less useful for other services we should care about.

Using check period instead would keep the resource monitor ‘clean’ and prevent from unnecessary notifications, but we’re ‘blind’ during night time. Reporting might be difficult (not completely thought about) and we like to have as much insight as possible, but check period will stop polling.

Now we came to recurring downtimes! I think, this would exactly do, what we expect - continue polling and visibility of the status 24x7, but treating occuring events as ‘handled’. No notification, no ticket and a clean resource monitor.

All good so far, but the recurring downtime is terrible to configure, if you need a downtime every night with different start- and endtimes, you need a weelky ‘plan’ with 14 periods - i.e. Monday, midnight until 10 AM and 8 PM until midnight and this for every day of the week.

Wouldn’t it be good to use the time-periods also for the recurring downtimes as already for check and notification period available?

A long explanation for a simple topic.