As enterprise cloud environments scale, keeping teams informed about maintenance and service updates becomes a balancing act. Too few alerts can lead to missed updates and unexpected disruptions, while too many can create notification fatigue.
In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), an individual cloud component that you create and manage is referred to as a resource. For Exadata Database Service, examples of these resources include Exadata Cloud Infrastructures and VM Clusters. When scheduled maintenance is required for these resources, a single update can require DBAs, infrastructure owners, and on-call teams to all respond differently.
To keep teams informed, two complementary approaches stand out: Maintenance Contacts for direct infrastructure maintenance update email communications and OCI Announcements for broader, filterable service communications. These can be used independently or together, depending on how your organization wants to distribute information.
What about OCI Events? Exadata Database Service also emits OCI Events for specific resource and maintenance activities. Event rules can be used to monitor selected event types and route them through OCI Notifications. In this blog, however, we focus on Maintenance Contacts and OCI Announcements as complementary ways to stay informed about maintenance and related service communications.
Choosing the Right Notification Approach
Option 1: Maintenance Contacts
Maintenance Contacts provide a direct way to receive email updates about Exadata infrastructure maintenance. You can specify up to 10 email addresses, including individual users or distribution lists, for each Exadata Infrastructure resource. Oracle sends maintenance email notifications directly to these contacts without requiring additional notification configuration.
Ideal if you:
- Want a simple, direct way to receive infrastructure maintenance updates throughout the maintenance lifecycle (i.e. before, during, planned changes, after)
- Manage distinct maintenance schedules per resource: Different Exadata systems (dev, test, production) require tailored recipient lists rather than a broad, tenancy wide broadcast
Option 2: OCI Announcements Service
OCI Announcements provides Oracle-published information about maintenance and service updates. For example, a Monthly Recommended Patches update for Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure may prompt customers to review security guidance and available Release Updates for Oracle Database and Grid Infrastructure. Teams can configure announcement subscriptions to define what announcements are delivered and which resources they apply to, while OCI Notifications topics and subscriptions determine who receives the matching announcements and how they are delivered, such as through email, Slack, PagerDuty, or OCI Functions.
Ideal if you:
- Need to route specific updates to different teams
- Want to integrate notifications with incident-management tools
- Need to scope notifications by announcement type, resource type, or compartment
Key Concepts
To get started with OCI Announcements, it helps to understand three core concepts:
- Announcement: A message published by Oracle about a service or maintenance update affecting your resources, such as planned maintenance, emergency changes, service disruptions, or informational updates. A full list of announcement types is available here.
- Announcement Subscription:A filter that defines which announcements are sent, based on criteria such as service, resource type, compartment, and announcement type. A full list of filters is available here.
- Topic: A communication channel that delivers messages to its subscribers. This is what connects your announcement subscriptions to your chosen destinations (email, Slack, PagerDuty, etc.). Learn more.
Sample Announcement Subscription Strategies
With these concepts in mind, you can tailor announcement subscriptions to each team’s responsibilities. The examples below show how to select, scope, and route announcements to the right team or tool.
DBA Team
Example Use Case: Create an announcement subscription to help DBAs prepare for maintenance and changes that may require action on their production environment for Exadata Database Service.
- Announcement types: Scheduled Maintenance, Required Action, Recommended Action, Planned Change, Information
- Service: Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure
- Compartment: Production Database Environment
- Topic: “Production Database Service Announcements (DBA Team)”
- Topic Subscription: DBA team (Email) or shared operations channel (Slack)
On-Call / Incident Response
Example Use Case: Create an announcement subscription to notify the on-call team of high-priority operational events affecting production resources so they can respond proactively.
- Announcement types: Emergency Change, Required Action, Event Notification
- Service: Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer
- Compartment: Mission Critical
- Topic: “Production On-Call Notifications”
- Topic Subscription: On-Call Engineer (PagerDuty) or incident response channel (Slack)
Combining Both Notification Strategies
Teams can use both approaches together as a dual-layer strategy. Maintenance Contacts lets you specify the DBAs and infrastructure owners who should receive email notifications about maintenance updates for the resources they manage, while OCI Announcements provides broader maintenance and service updates that can be filtered through announcement subscriptions and routed through OCI Notifications to central operations teams or tools. This keeps resource owners informed while giving the broader organization a structured way to receive and track relevant maintenance and service updates.
Both approaches need occasional upkeep to remain accurate. Using a distribution list for Maintenance Contacts can simplify recipient management as team membership changes, while an announcement subscription scoped to a compartment that has since been restructured can quietly stop covering the resources it was meant to. Revisiting maintenance contacts lists and announcement subscriptions as teams and environments evolve keeps notifications aligned with who’s responsible today.
Let’s Set It Up
Let us start with a simple use case: you want your team to be notified about maintenance and service-impacting events related to some VM Clusters running on Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure.
At a high level, the setup involves three steps:
- Identify your Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure VM Cluster
- Create an Announcement Subscription and add the appropriate filters for your notification needs
- Configure a Notification Topic to determine where matching announcements are delivered
You’re All Set
An effective notification strategy is about more than receiving updates, it’s about getting the right information to the right people at the right time.
Whether you use Maintenance Contacts for straightforward resource-level communication, OCI Announcements for more targeted routing, or a combination of both, the goal is to keep your teams informed, reduce unnecessary noise, and make important operational information easier to act on.
Ready to configure it? See How to Configure OCI Announcement Subscriptions for Exadata Database Service for the complete step-by-step walkthrough.
For additional announcement types, filtering options, and advanced configurations, refer to the OCI Announcements Service documentation.