Follow-the-sun with Secondary ?

#1

I’d like to create a follow-the-sun rotation across Europe and North America. Europe looks after mostly European daytime hours, likewise for North America.

What we’d like to do is create a secondary escalation to the other geography in the event of non-acknowledgment.

For example:

  • Alert fires is routed to North American oncall; they do not answer
  • Alert then escalates to whomever the European oncaller is for that day

Right now it seems like this is not possible, as the Schedule has the time restrictions and not the Escalation Policy. In my head the way I would model this is:

  • Create a Schedule for Europe with all members, 24x7
  • Create a Schedule for North America with all members, 24x7
  • Route alerts at L1 in the Escalation policy to Europe for European hours, North America for North American Hours
  • Route alerts at L2 to Europe for North American hours, and to North America for European Hours

Is there another way to accomplish this? I can’t think of a way without creating a bunch more schedules with different time restrictions (but this has the issue of forgetting overrides, swaps, etc between them).

#2

Hi Sean,

Thanks for reaching out! You’re right about schedules managing time restrictions rather than escalation policies, which does make your configuration difficult to implement.

I may have a workaround in mind. Could you clarify exactly when you’d like for unacknowledged incidents to escalate to the other team/geography? Would it only be during the handoff from one team to the other (for example, every day at 7 PM) or would you like these incidents to escalate even if the other team is not technically on-call yet (for example, after 1 hour unacknowledged incidents should escalate to the other team).

Cassie Champagne
Technical Support Specialist
PagerDuty Support

#3

Thanks for the response Cassie.

We’d like to have unacknowledged incidents to escalate to the other geography even if they’re not technically oncall.

Our intent is this:

  • 24 hours coverage; 12 hours covered by North America, 12 by Europe.
  • The two oncallers (North America and Europe) may get pages for the other geo out of hours, but as secondary (“oops I missed a page”) escalation only.
#4

Thanks for clarifying that, Sean!

Let me know if the below suggestion would work:

  1. Create one schedule, we’ll call it “Follow the Sun Primary”. In this schedule we’ll have two layers:
    • Layer 1 would contain all of the North America members and restricted to their 12 hours.
    • Layer 2 would contain all of the Europe members and restricted to their 12 hours.
  2. Create another schedule, “Follow the Sun Backup”. In this schedule, we’ll have two layers again, but they’ll be reversed:
    • Layer 1 would contain the Europe members and restricted to North America’s 12 hours.
    • Layer 2 would contain the North America members and restricted to Europe’s 12 hours.
  3. Place the “Follow the Sun Primary” in level one of your escalation policy and “Follow the Sun Backup” in level two. Configure your desired escalation timeout.

The above should result in having a North America member on-call in level 1 and a Europe member on-call in level 2 during NA hours. Once it reached EU hours, this should switch where a Europe member is on-call in level 1 and a NA member is on-call in level 2.

The above would still require two separate schedules to maintain in the event of an override, but hopefully fewer than you may have anticipated.

If attempting the above still doesn’t quite meet your needs and you would like further assistance in this matter, please feel free to reach out to us at support@pagerduty.com with a link to your escalation policy and we’d be happy to take a look.

Cassie Champagne
Technical Support Specialist
PagerDuty Support