Creating funky schedule + escalation policy.

#1

Hi there

I have a very interesting scenario for which I would like to have PagerDuty assist us.

We have a team of people in the Americas. However, they are located in different timezones - UTC-8, UTC-5, and some even in UTC-3. They have an on-call responsibility.

They rotate this responsibility automatically via PagerDuty, and the responsibility is only during their business hours.

Does anyone have a way through which we can set up an automatic rotation, but that would set up the shift based on the person’s timezone?

Example:

P1: UTC -8
P2: UTC -5
P3: UTC -4
P4: UTC -3
P5: UTC -8

Monday: P1, 9am-5pm their local time (1700-0100 UTC)
Tuesday: P2, 9am-5pm their local time (1400-2200 UTC)
Wednesday: P3, 9am-5pm their local time (1300-2100 UTC)
Thursday: P4, 9am-5pm their local time (1200-2000 UTC)
Friday: P5, 9am-5pm their local time (1700-0100 UTC)

The reason why we want this to be automated on the P’s timezone is that we want to give the ability of P5 to override P3, for example, if P3 is going to be out and P5 volunteers to take their on-call shift.

Anyone has done this in the past? How did you achieve it? Open to hearing solutions!

#2

Hey Jose,

Thanks for reaching out!

When a schedule is created, it will be set to the account-level time zone by default. You may, however, choose to edit the schedule to be in a different time zone than the account-level time zone. To account for your user’s various time zones, you could create a schedule that takes into account each user’s time zone by utilizing the schedule layers and the schedule restriction options. The users would need to account for their personal time zone when making changes to the schedule.

At this time schedules cannot be configured to reflect each individual’s separate time zones. I would like to mention that users have the option to update the time zone that the schedule is viewed in from their account, but it is not something that can be set when configuring the schedule. Further, users who are not in the same time zone as the schedule will still view the times on that schedule as being in their time zone.

I understand the unique issue you’re facing here. I’m happy to articulate a feature request around this for you, if there is anything else you would like to add please feel free to submit a support ticket to support@pagerduty.com

Best,

Nadia Simmons
Technical Support Specialist
PagerDuty Support

#3

Hey Nadia,

It seems like there’s some confusion here. This is not about viewing the schedule, but rather that to ensure that the shifts are in the local times. If you read the example at the bottom of my original post it should provide you with more context.

Let me know if this is still not possible.

#4

Hi Jose,

I am afraid, it has to be calculated manually. The account may be set to one default timezone and then the times have to be supplied in that timezone. There is a little TimeZone dropdown in the Schedules page, but then this will be applied to all the entries made on that page. So, this leaves you with the only choice to do these time zone calculations manually.
I personally use the worldtimebuddy.com to get around this problem, but then different people have different ways to do the same thing.

I hope this helps.

Kind regards,