Manage on-call schedules and rotations

Opsgenie schedules are used to determine who is on-call at a given time. Schedules are defined via the Team > On-call section. In addition, a team schedule is created automatically for each team when the team is created. The team schedule is managed through the team dashboard as well.

Watch Setting up On-Call Schedules video.

Schedule Management

Opsgenie supports creating and managing on-call schedules in just a few short steps. Admins (and team admins) can set up schedules with daily, weekly, and custom rotations, and specify the schedule as a recipient of the alerts for Opsgenie to determine who is notified according to the on-call schedule.

To create a schedule, go to the desired Team dashboard under the On-call sub-menu, then scroll down to the module for On-call Schedules. Select Add schedule button.

Name:

Give the schedule a name using only letter, numbers, underscores, and dots. You will use this name when configuring the on-call schedule in your team Routing Rules.

Time zone:

Select the appropriate time zone and save it.

Select Add rotation to begin populating the schedule.

Rotations:

A rotation is group of people who rotate through the same shift. You can provide multiple rotations for a schedule; and rotations can be restricted to specific time periods. When an alert is escalated through the schedule, all on-call users in all the different rotations are notified (cumulative).
Opsgenie supports multiple rotations with different participants, rotations, and time intervals to be defined for a schedule. When a schedule is being used to determine who is notified, all on-call users from different rotations are notified.

As rotations are defined, Opsgenie automatically calculates and displays who is on-call and when, according to the parameters below:

Starting date and time indicates when the rotation becomes active. Schedule rotations are calculated from this date and time. The time is often particularly important as it becomes the handover time for on-call responsibilities (e.g. start of business day vs. start of actual day at midnight). Default rotation start time is 08:00.

End date and time indicates when the rotation ends and becomes inactive. No on-call rotation can be used after the specified end date of the rule. End date is optional; if it's left unspecified the rotation will continue indefinitely.

Participants are users, teams, and escalations in addition to No-One which is the specific participant type. If a rotation has No-One participant, nobody is on-call for the time ranges that the no-one participant is configured to be on-call. A user can be included multiple times for more frequent participation in the rotation. Change the order of the participants by dragging and dropping the participants on the list. Each participant is assigned a color and is represented with that color in the schedule preview.

Rotations are daily, weekly, or custom. Select daily rotation if participants rotate every 24 hours starting from the specified starting date and time. Select weekly rotation to rotate participants every week starting from the specified date and time. The custom rotation feature is useful to specify a different length of rotation (e.g. 8 hours, 3 days, 3 weeks, etc.) or to specify multiple start or end times and days of the week.

Rotations can be restricted to a certain day and time of the week. Limiting the time frame of the rotations allows defining different on-call schedules at different time periods, such as working hours, off hours, and weekends. Rotations are cumulative. If the time frames for rotations overlap, all the rotations apply, hence there may be multiple participants assigned to be on-call at the same time.

Personal Schedule View

Users can view and export schedules assigned to them by using On call schedule tab under My profile on the Settings page.

​Export Schedules as iCalendar

You can export schedules in an iCalendar format that is supported by Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, and many other calendars. It saves the following 12 months of the schedule, starting from the current month.

Select Export team schedule on the icon bar to download the next 12 months of your current schedule.

You can also choose to export the schedule periodically. Select Open calendar from the icon bar to export the next 3 months to your calendar, starting from the current month. At the end of the initial 3 months, Opsgenie will automatically keep exporting the next 3 months period from the schedule.

To find out how to export your own schedules, go to Your on-call schedule .