How do I add more than one person on-call for a schedule?

#1

You can only have one person on-call at a given time on a schedule. Schedules have layers which are essentially shifts. Within a layer you can rotate shifts through a group of people and have multiple layers. Friendly reminder that the last layer in a schedule always takes precedence over the previous layer. For more information on scheduling layers, view our knowledge base article here.

In order to add more than one person on-call, you would need to do this through our escalation policy. When a PagerDuty incident is triggered, the escalation policy tied to the service in which the incident was triggered on, determines who to notify based on which user or which schedule is on the first level of the policy. You can add more than one schedule or user to an escalation policy, which allows you to notify more than one person who is on-call. For more information on escalation policies, view our knowledge base article here.

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#2

So what if the number of people required for a shift varies? e.g. This Monday morning we need 3 people on call, next Monday morning is the release and we need 6 people on call, and this is generally adjusted on a per-day basis. How would one do that in PagerDuty?

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#3

Agreed that >1 on-call is valuable. We are evaluating other products because PD doesn’t provide the ability to do this for a use-case.

For certain escalation policies, we want to notify all members of a layer, with anyone on that layer able to acknowledge. e.g. a critical incident that has 2 teams in different time zones, all members of 1 team during certain time window, and all members of another during the other time window.

When configuring a schedule, at the layer, having a “all members concurrently on-call” option would be great. Or possibly adding that “all members” in the escalation configuration… either or, but definitely an important requirement for us.

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#4

Hi @BrettTheGeek,

It does sound like Escalation Policies should work for you by adding multiple schedules to an Escalation Policy Level, or adding all individuals you want to raise to a Level (like a line of last resort).

For the timezone-based teams, using Restrict on-call shifts to specific times should give you the ability to have two different teams present in either the same Schedule* or multiple Schedules on the same Escalation Policy Level.

(*) NOTE: because of daylight savings time I’d recommend either having both teams in different layers on the same Schedule (best) or using the same timezone for each different Schedule you implement to prevent overlaps and gaps.

Cheers,
@simonfiddaman

#5

We had something similar requested, what we did was to create Schedules for each of the person that would overlap then added that to an escalation policy for the team. For the day they needed to add others, the manager made sure to add the other people to the appropriate schedule then remove them once the day was over.

#6

Having an entire system updated to accommodate these custom one offs is not the right way to build a platform in my opinion. We are currently discussing the way people think about things, we have a human tendency to want to jerry rig things into our status quo mindset rather than change our mindset to not do things status quo or try to fidget a square into a circle (just MHO).

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