# Introduction to On-call schedules

## What is On-call?

On-call is making sure there are one or more persons responsible to be alerted on all incidents and outages. A person will be on-call for a period of time who sole responsibility to listen to alerts and respond to incidents. This is relatively an old concept, we are getting inspired from doctors and firefighters.

**Example:** At any given point in time, there will be one or more doctors at the Emergency room in a hospital when the patient arrives. These doctors are "on-call". For a critical patient, a doctor can help instantly and if need be, they can escalate to others to attend to the patient.

Similarly, your team can have at least one person on-call for a set period of time to respond to critical incidents, to say the least.

{% hint style="info" %}
A person will either be on-call or not. You cannot "create" on-call. You will create schedules for who will be on-call.
{% endhint %}

### What is an On-call schedule?

Schedules determine who is/will be on-call. You can create a flexible schedule, one that works for everyone and add team members to it. Schedules will make sure to rotate the members on daily, weekly or even custom time intervals.

!\[Example of Daily rotation among 2 members]\(../.gitbook/assets/On-call calendar.gif)

### 1. Who should use on-call?

Anyone with more than one team member.

### 2. Who can create schedules?

Admins and members can both create and edit schedules. Use fine-grained access control to manage on-call permissions

### **3. Does being on-call mean ALL the alerts will come to me?**

No, you can choose which escalation policy alerts an on-call user would receive.