The solution described is achievable, although perhaps not desirable! It might take a bit of effort, but once done, it might give you the control you require. Having said that, I don't think there is a master switch to stop all alerts, although perhaps you could write a script to send a ReST command to disable each of the alerts (I am not sure if that's even possible though). You would need another script to re-enable the alerts of course. You still haven't answered the fundamental question of how you tell Splunk that there is a maintenance period. For example, some people use a lookup file with dates and time of maintenance periods, and the alerts all check whether a maintenance period is currently active and take appropriate action. Depending on your overall alerting architecture, you may be able to take maintenance periods into account further downstream, e.g. if your alerts are integrated with Service Now, you may be able to suppress alert actions during maintenance periods.
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