Help › Running your workspace

Creating a rotation

1. Go to On-call → Rotations and choose New rotation.
2. Give it a Name and a Timezone, such as America/New_York. Handovers stay at the same local time across daylight-saving changes.
3. Set the First handover and how often it changes: Every day, Every week, Every two weeks, Every four weeks, or Every few days… (1 to 90).
4. Under Who is in the rotation, add people in order. The order is both the rota and the order people are tried when someone doesn't answer.
5. Choose What this rotation is paged about: Every queue, Choose queues, or Nothing on its own (a backup rotation).
6. Choose When this rotation is on duty: Around the clock, Outside business hours only, or Business hours only.

How paging works

• The person on call gets a notification, another four minutes later, then a phone call at eight minutes.
• If they don't answer, the next person in the rotation gets a notification and a call a minute later, and so on for up to four people.
• People marked away are skipped. Someone without the app goes straight to a call.
• If nobody answers (Then ring): on Business, hand the incident to another rotation, up to three deep. On Team, everyone in the rotation is called in turn, then the incident stays open.

How many calls

• By default there's no limit: every incident that calls for a phone call gets one, however busy the night.
• The same alarm firing again within 20 minutes updates the open incident instead of calling again.
• To cap calls, edit the rotation and tick Limit calls per shift. Once that many incidents have called the person on shift, later ones that shift arrive as notifications instead. The incident says why, admins get one email, and the count resets at handover.
• As a safety stop, if a workspace's rules call about 2,000 incidents in one month, calls pause until the 1st and alerts continue as notifications. That only happens when a rule is badly misconfigured. Admins are emailed at 80% and again if calls pause.

Time off and cover

On a rotation's card, choose Book time off or cover. Pick Who, then Away or Covering, and the First day and Last day (both included). Someone marked away isn't rung for their shift or as a backup. For a swap, add an Away entry for one person and a Covering entry for the other.

People can also ask for cover from the phone app. On Business, you can require an admin to approve first: Settings → Shift swaps and time away. A request nobody decides goes through when the shift starts.

Calendar

On a rotation, choose Create a calendar link to put shifts in Google Calendar (Other calendars → From URL) or Outlook (Add calendar → Subscribe from web). Copy it straight away; it's shown once. Replace link or Stop sharing if it gets passed around.

Next: Alert rules and shadow mode