The digitalization of the economy in the past decades has made data availability grow and become more important. From the maintenance point of view, clients are more demanding, wanting systems that will not have breakdowns while reducing exploitation costs. This challenging scenario has pushed companies in the direction of more intelligent maintenance solutions that involve choosing the best course of action in terms of system availability. Nowadays, these solutions are usually called prescriptive maintenance. This term is vaguely defined and its use is often unjustified. In this article we will discuss what really characterizes prescriptive maintenance, review some of the work published with this term and propose a generic framework to guide the development of such solutions. In the end, we will illustrate the use of the generic framework in a practical case.