Introduction to Slots in schedules
Slots can bring relief to your team by restricting what parts of the day/week one has to be on-call
Slots are easy, flexible way to make sure your team is only on-call during specific times of day or week. This helps avoid alert fatigue since a member doesn't have to be on-call 24 * 7.
You can choose one of the 2 types of slots to add - Slots for day and for week. You can configure them while creating or editing an on-call schedule. Different slots can be applied to different layers.
We will learn how to add slots but before that let's look at some examples of different slots.
If your team members don't wish to be on-call 24 hours of the day then you can add a slot like below wherein the person will only be on-call from 6 PM to 9 AM everyday for Layer 1
On-call every from 6 PM to 9 AM
Alternatively, you can choose for your team members to be on-call on specific times and days of week. In the example below, we have chosen for members to be on-call every Monday 6 PM to Tuesday 9 AM and then Thursday 6 PM to Friday 6 PM for Layer 1
On-call every Monday 6 PM to Tuesday 9 AM and then Thursday 6 PM to Friday 6 PM
While creating or editing an on-call schedule, you will find the option to add slots in every layer.
Add slots on each layer
While slots can be added to each layer, please bear in mind that it will affect the entire on-call schedule.
Here are some use cases you might helpful.
Slots for specific times of day
- 1.Slots for non-office hours, like the one above.
- 2.Different slots for each layer like 12 AM to 8 AM in Layer 1, 8 AM to 4 PM for Layer 2 and then 4 PM to 12 AM for Layer 3. This ensures rotation among your members with 8 hour duties to be rotated on a weekly or daily basis.
Slots for specific times and days of week
- 1.Slots to be on-call only for weekdays i.e. Monday 9 AM to Friday 6 PM.
- 2.Let's assume we have maintenance scheduled for the entire day on Thursday and want no-one to be on-call. Here's how you could do it - multiple slots across the week - Monday 9 AM to Thursday 12 AM and then Friday 12 AM to Monday 9 AM.
Avoid overlapping when selecting days and times of week. For ex: Monday 9 AM to Thursday 9 AM and then another condition for Tuesday 9 AM to Friday 9 AM. In this case, you are overlapping both conditions for Tuesday and Wednesday. Please avoid this.