Below are the key components for creating a schedule -
Team members who will be on-call
Rotation determines the duration of on-call shift
Handoff is the time when shift rotates
On-call section is situated on the nav bar of your dashboard.
Head over to On-call section in the header and click schedules and then New schedule
Step 1: Add members - Should be at least one member
Step 2: Select rotation - Choose from daily, weekly and custom
Step 3: Add handoff time
This is how our daily rotational oncall form would look like -
The above on-call schedule has 2 members, rotates daily and the shift changes at 11:00 AM everyday. This also means our team members will be on-call for 24 hours straight.
For more more controlled rotation, you can also select custom from the dropdown for rotation.
In the image above, we have set a custom rotation of 4 days after which the next person will be on-call.
Custom rotation includes Hours, Days, Weeks and Months. You can create 12 hour shifts, 2 day shifts or even 4 weeks or 1 month shifts if you would like.
Once created, your on-call schedules will look like this -
The calendar will give you a perfect understanding of who's on-call at a given date. You can choose to navigate and plan your dates accordingly too.
If you select hourly rotation then the calendar will shift to weekly view automatically.
Creating a schedule means nothing if you alerts are not being send to the one who is on-call. To do so, head over to your escalation policy and choose to either create one or edit an existing escalation policy.
You can choose to add Schedule just like you would any user to a policy with the alert channel.
Once added, you can treat the schedules just like users and add them at any step in escalation policy. However, we would recommend adding them in the first step so as to route the alerts directly to the on-call person.