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On-call scheduling

Paint the week. The right person gets paged.

Pick a person like a brush and drag across the grid to fill their hours. When an email alert set to follow the rota fires, it goes to whoever is on duty right then. No calendars to sync, no rotation rules to configure.

  • Quick fill for the common shapes. Lay down weekdays, weeknights or a whole week in a single click, then adjust the edges by hand.
  • One person on duty at a time. Painting over someone else's slot hands it over, so the rota is never ambiguous about who is responsible.
  • Reads in your timezone. Hours are stored against the planner timezone, so 09:00 stays 09:00 when the clocks change.
01 · The planner

A repeating week, painted by hand.

The rota is a grid of hours across a week. You fill it the way you would fill cells in a spreadsheet, and it repeats until you change it.

Paint with a person

Select an engineer and drag across the hours they cover. Filling a shift takes a gesture rather than a form.

Quick fill

Lay down weekdays, weeknights or the whole week in one click, then adjust the edges by hand.

One engineer per hour

Only one person is on call for any given hour. Painting over an existing slot hands it over, so responsibility is never split or unclear.

Timezone aware

Set the planner timezone once. Hours are stored against that zone rather than a fixed offset, so a shift does not drift when the clocks change.

Visible at a glance

Gaps in coverage are obvious because they are the empty cells. You can see a weekend nobody has claimed without reading a single rule.

Editable by full members

Full members can change the rota. Read-only members can view it, so everyone can see who is on duty without being able to reassign it.

02 · How alerts use it

Turn it on per step, not globally.

The rota does not take over your alerting. It is an option on an individual email step, so you decide which alerts follow it and which go to a fixed address.

Follow the rota

Enable "use the on-call schedule" on any email step and it pages whoever is on duty when it fires, in place of a fixed recipient.

Fixed recipients still work

Steps that should always reach a specific person or a shared inbox simply do not have the option turned on.

A gap is a fallback, not an error

If nobody is on call when an alert fires, the email goes to its own chosen recipient instead, so a page is never silently dropped.

Escalate past the on-call

Combine it with a wait step and a second email to a named engineer, so an unclaimed page moves up rather than sitting there.

Questions

Common questions

How is the on-call schedule set up?
You paint a repeating week. Select a team member, drag across the hours they are covering, and the pattern repeats until you edit it. Quick fill options lay down common shapes such as weekdays or weeknights in a single click.
Can two people be on call at the same time?
No. Only one engineer is on duty for any given hour, which is deliberate. Painting over someone else's slot hands it over. An ambiguous rota is worse than no rota because everyone assumes the other person has it.
What happens if nobody is on call when an alert fires?
The email falls back to its own chosen recipient. A gap in the rota is treated as a fallback rather than an error, so an alert is never dropped just because an hour was left unpainted.
Does the schedule handle daylight saving time?
Yes. Hours are stored against the planner timezone rather than a fixed UTC offset, so a shift that starts at 09:00 still starts at 09:00 after the clocks change.
Which plans include on-call scheduling?
On-call scheduling is part of the Team and Business plans, alongside team members. Full members can edit the rota and read-only members can view it.
Keep reading

Related features

Stop guessing who is on call.

Paint a week, point an email step at it, and let the alert find the right person on its own.