On-Call Scheduling

Owned by David Stavisski
Last updated: Jan 02, 2024
3 min read

IT Organizations delivering critical always-on infrastructure need around the clock support. Groups of engineers in different time zones are normally tasked with being first line of defense against outages and performance issues. These engineers usually are on a rotated schedule where each person in the group serves as the primary contact during his/her business hours some days of the week, depending on the size of the group and the size of the IT environment.

Samples from other vendors:

https://www.pagerduty.com/resources/learn/call-rotations-schedules/

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/vancouver-it-service-management/page/administer/on-call-scheduling/task/create-update-schedule-oncall.html

https://www.atlassian.com/incident-management/on-call/on-call-schedules#how-to-construct-a-fair-effective-schedule-that-wont-burn-out-your-teams

IT-Conductor delivers integrated On-Call Scheduling!

  • Flexible shifts and rotations definitions

    • Multiple Shifts per organization

    • Shifts support multiple Rotation schedules

    • Custom on-call times for moth and week days

  • Integrated with Time-off schedules

    • Time-off requests and other events in the calendar are taken into consideration when on-call shifts are scheduled

  • Fully integrated into IT-Conductor notification architecture

    • use shift transparently as notification targets in subscriptions etc.

    • shifts can be used as a recipient for logs shipping and reports

 

Configuration

  1. Navigate to On-Call Shifts

  1. Open Shifts Panel

  1. Create new Shift.

 

  1. Click on Rotation tool to configure Shift’s rotations

  1. Create new Shift Rotations

    1. Usually you would create rotations based on rough time zone where the members are located

    2. Rotations can be cycled based on selected intervals/frequencies - Daily (1 Day), Weekly (1 Week) etc

    3. A rotation can have higher and lower priority (0 - the highest), when resolving the time overlaps the rotation with higher priority winds - a member of this rotation will be always assigned the full time slot, others with lower priorities will have their slots truncated

    4. The Rotation time-slots are configured as Time Restrictions - for a Daily rotation you need to define the timeslots for the week days - time slots can have gaps - these can be covered by other rotations

  1. For each created Rotation Click on tool icon (user) to Assign Rotation Members/Participants - select Users and save

  1. After the rotations have been configured give it a few minutes and schedules will be created. Click on the shift link (3) to see the roster. You can navigate the shift back and forth in time and access individual on-call assignments by clicking on the colored bars

  1. Use your organization Calendar view to manage all scheduled events including times off, scheduled Maintenance Mode, On-call assignments etc.

 

  1. User personal Calendar to see your on-call assignments and other events: