Create an on-call schedule with business and off-hours

On-call schedule with different rotations for business hours and off hours

Scenario:

During business hours (weekdays 09:00-18:00), all members of Platform Team are notified for alerts. In the evenings and on weekends, Rebecca, George, and Sarah share the on-call duty, rotating daily.

Business hours rotation

1. On your Team's dashboard, under the On-call sub-menu access the module for On-Call Schedules, click on the "Add Schedule" button.

2. Give the schedule a Name. Names can only contain alphanumeric characters, dots, underscores, and dashes. In this scenario, a schedule named ”businesshours_offhours” will be created. Select this name when setting up alerts recipients to have alerts sent to the appropriate on-call responders.

3. Select the appropriate Time zone and save.

4. Click the plus button near “Rotations” to begin populating an on-call schedule. In this example, we will create two rotations: one for business hours and one for off hours.

Business hours

1. Input Start date and time to indicate when the first schedule rotation becomes active. Schedule rotations are calculated beginning from this date and time, so ensure you have chosen the appropriate turnover time for rotations (e.g., start of business day at 09:00 vs. start of actual day at 00:00). In this scenario, the weekday rotation begins at open of business on Monday morning, so 09:00 is selected as the start time.

2. Select Participants. Participants may be users, teams, and escalations. In this example, all members of a pre-defined team, the Platform Team, are to be notified based on team’s routing rules, escalations and on-call schedules. Your group is assigned a color and is represented with that color in the schedule preview.

3. Select rotation. In this example, Platform Team is always on call during work hours. There is no rotation of responsibility, so “daily,” “weekly,” or “custom” may be selected, but you must define business hours. Toggle the switch for “Restrict to time intervals”. Now, identify business hours; you must input hours for each day. For example, Monday 09:00 to Monday 18:00; Click the plus sign to specify additional business hours, e.g. Tuesday 09:00 to Tuesday 18:00. If you were instead to specify Monday 09:00 to Friday 18:00, you would include evening hours Monday through Thursday in the time period.

4. Verify the schedule. As rotations are defined, Opsgenie automatically calculates and displays who will be on-call and when.

5. Click “Save” to save the rotation that specifies business hours notification policy.

Off-hours Rotation

1. Click add rotation button again to specify an off-hours rotation.

2. Select Participants. In this example, Rebecca, George, and Sarah share on-call duties during off-hours. Change the order of the participants by dragging and dropping the participants in the list. Each participant is assigned a color and is represented by that color in the schedule preview.

3. Select rotation. In this example, Rebecca, George, and Sarah rotate on-call responsibility daily in the evenings and on weekends. First, select “daily” to indicate the length of the rotation. Second, specify off-hour time periods by toggling the switch for "Restrict to time intervals". Identify off-hours by day. For example, Monday 18:00 to Tuesday 09:00; Tuesday 18:00 to Wednesday 09:00. Click the plus sign to specify additional business hours. Make sure to capture the weekend with Friday 18:00 to Monday 09:00.

4. Verify the schedule.

5. Click “Save” to save the rotation that specifies off-hours notification policy.

6. You can go back to the On-Call Schedule module (Under the On-call sub-menu of your Team dashboard) and open, export, clone, edit, or delete your on-call schedules.