Guide

On-call

Who gets woken, in what order, and what happens when nobody answers.

Step by step

On-call → Schedules → + New schedule. One schedule per team, in that team’s own time zone — never one per service. Which service wakes which team is a routing decision, and it belongs to the escalation policy.
Set the Rotation — daily, weekly or every so many days — the handoff time, read on the team’s clock, and who is in it, in order. Two people at least. A handoff at midnight hands the pager to somebody asleep who has read nothing.
The calendar shows a week at a time. Each rotation is a layer; most teams need one, and a second layer is a second rotation sitting on top of it. Your own shifts are drawn in bold.
To hand over a single night, click that shift and use Cover this shift: who covers, why, Cover it. The rotation underneath takes over again the moment it ends. Never edit the rotation to change one night — that rewrites it for everybody, forever.
On-call → Escalation is the ladder: each step names who it reaches — a schedule, a person, a channel — and how long it waits for an acknowledgement before the next one. Make the last step a second schedule or a channel, never one more person. The preview underneath says in plain words what happens to a critical incident at three in the morning.
On-call → Me is yours: your time zone, your quiet hours, the order the methods are tried in, and the number a page calls. Add it, verify it with the code you are sent, and send yourself one test page.

Quiet hours, and what they do not do

Quiet hours downgrade a warning: inside them it arrives quietly, or waits. They never mute a critical page. Somebody asking not to be woken for critical incidents is really asking not to be on call, and that is a conversation, not a setting.

Everything a ladder does is written down while it happens. Every attempt to reach a person has a row before the call and a row with its outcome, and nobody — us included — can edit or delete either. If a page did not arrive, the record says where it stopped.

The one thing people get wrong

A rotation with somebody who has no verified number. The schedule looks right, the ladder looks right, and the page reaches nobody. The calendar does say so — Somebody on this schedule cannot be woken — and it is exactly the kind of banner people scroll past. Before the first real page, everybody on the rotation verifies a number and sends one test.

Where to go next

Then the page your customers read while you work.