Complex Schedule for Weekday (Always) / Weekends (Rotation)

#1

Hi There,

I’m working through an exercise in PD to revamp our schedule. Currently we’re on a simple 24x7 rotation with 4 agents and two services (24x7 and after hours only) - pretty simple.

However with new colleagues coming onboard at different skill levels we’re trying to hand off some of the on call work to newer junior engineers.

Here’s what I’m attempting to do:

Weekday:

  • User 1 & User 2 are always on call together from 8AM-6PM
  • User 3,4,5 are always on call together as escalation from 8AM - 6PM
  • User 6,7 are always on call together as 3rd level escalation from 8AM - 6PM
  • User 8 is always on call as escalation 4th level from 8AM - 6PM
  • User 9 is always on call as escalation 5th level from 8AM - 6PM

Weeknight / Weekends

  • User 3,4,6,7 are on call from 6PM to 8AM, then all day Saturday/Sunday
  • User 8 is escalation level 2 always
  • User 9 is escalation level 3 always

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

  1. Built a “Weekday” schedule for each individual user that restricts to the 8AM-6PM blocks M to F
  2. Built a “Evenings and Weekends” schedule for the 4 users who will be handling rotation and restricted it to 6PM to 8AM weeknights and all day saturday/sunday
  3. Built an Escalation Policy for “Weekday” that uses the above schedules in the order mentioned
  4. Built an Escalation Policy for “Evenings and Weekends” that uses the weekend schedule as mentioned.

Basically I’m trying to figure out if I need all the individual schedules, or if schedule layers is enough? I think I do because if I don’t want a user to rotate (aka user 1 and 2 are always on call, every weekday) then they need to be on their own schedule so they just rotate with themselves over and over.

Also, for scheduling overrides, we tried today to see if we could replace one agent with another for a week; but it doesn’t appear to respect the restrictions, it just blocks the whole time off. What happens in this scenario if other schedules are in place?

Does that work?

Thanks!

Sean

#2

Hi Sean,

Thank you for reaching out to PagerDuty Customer Support!

It sounds like you got it all set up correctly! If you want users 1-9 to always be on-call at some level of an escalation policy, you want them to be restricted to certain hours, and those hours are part of multiple shifts, then what you have works just fine.

If you want to consolidate some of that, then you could combine the Weekday and Weeknight/Weekends schedules for User 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 with with 2 layers (layer 1 for M-F 0800-1800, layer for M-F 1800-0800), and you can create a 3rd layer for Users 3,4, 6, and 7 for the all day shifts on the weekend.

Hopefully you already knew this, but you can copy/clone/duplicate a schedule that you’ve already made and saved, so that you can easy generate similar schedules. Please see the documentation for that here.

Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns.

Best regards,
-Seong