Automate OnCall Scheduling Exclusions for User Vacations

#1

Problem
As most here, we use PagerDuty OnCall extensively in our team and we have a large team that is very dynamic. We rotate the on-call schedule, and have to manually coordinate our vacation schedules with others on the list (overrides & such, IF we can find someone willing to switch who is also not scheduled for the same vacation time). It’s a bit of a regular awkward hassle. …and then when people are added/removed, the schedule shifts around, and we have to re-coordinate all over for any new conflicts or un-override the switches that are now no longer needed.

While we could continue this process indefinitely via the inefficient/manual combination of Outlook & Slack & PD, it would be MUCH easier if this were automated in PD - even if only slightly less manual.

Proposed Feature Request
If team members could simply put their vacation days into a personal “PD vacation calendar”, then when PD is re-allocating schedules for the users, it could simply skip assigning someone as OnCall during their vacation dates (shift them to before/after their vacation). Then there would be no more regular time-consuming coordination, awkward conversations about switching, re-evaluation every time the roster is re-shuffled with new persons, etc. Overrides would then only be needed for cases of emergencies or oversights.

An automated approach like this would reduce a lot of overhead across our team. I figured I would raise the feature request, because I’m guessing we’re not the only team regularly impacted by this issue.

Thanks for the consideration!
Clint

5 Likes
#2

Hello Clint,

The feature request has been logged with the Product Team.

Please do register and keep an eye on the What’s New page for details of new features.

Kind regards,

#3

Thank you for logging that with Product, Chiedu!
Good tip, I will make sure to watch the “What’s New” page. :+1:

Cheers,
Clint

#4

Hi there,
we just made our first baby steps with PD and it turned out that having a similar vacation calendar feature implemented as Clint recommended would be really helpful to manage OC, vacation and maybe extra hours handling on the same page.
I am looking forward to this new feature.
Miki

#5

Agreed with everyone here - it’s surprising that this is still not supported by a nearly $3B company. This is a quality of life feature that will improve the life for every existing customer while new features may only be adopted by a subset.

#6

FYKI, I attended an online course on 10/01 with PagerDuty and hiped this topic as it fit for the classe’s subject. I received no in-depth response, just something like “we know about this and will work on it among other similar topics”.

#7

This costs us quite a bit of time (manually chatting back and forth to work out who can cover who when each time). I would really like to see a feature like this implemented. Bonus points for integration with GCal and other existing calendar/PTO management services.

1 Like
#8

Hi all,

We have some similar concerns about vacations.

+1 to add a user’s “vacation calendar” (whatever the name) in PagerDuty

Even without changing anything in the existing schedule feature. It can simply be to provide the following check: what are the oncall shifts for user A in conflict with it’s “vacation calendar” on the next 2 months?

As a user: I will be able to know those conflicts easily and discuss with my teammates to set an override accordingly.

It could be a first step before changing the schedule feature behavior.

Regards

PS: sync another calendar system to the user’s “vacation calendar” in PagerDuty may be a great feature too

2 Likes
#9

+1
It would be very helpful to have such a feature . e.g., “vacation calendar”, supported by PD. It will save us a lot of time and manual work to overwrite user’s schedules.

1 Like
#10

Hi Clint, and everybody else who has this need. I experienced this same scheduling challenge with my oncall teams for years. I built a product to try to solve it. Check out the PagerDuty 3rd party integration https://oncallscheduler.com. It lets engineers enter preferences for when they don’t want to be scheduled, as well as self-select specific shifts that work well for them. It has block-periods where admins can enter that someone will be on leave (e.g. parental, military, …) and thus can’t be scheduled. It has a credit system which makes undesirable shifts (New Years?) more valuable and causes the people who work those shifts to work less shifts in total. There’s more… If you have questions about it after checking out the URL above, send email to kristian@timewesp.com.