Schedules

What are Schedules?

Schedules are used to determine who will be notified when an incident is triggered for your service in PagerDuty. For each schedule, only one user can be on-call at a time and you can configure how frequently/when the on-call user switches off.

Useful Links

• Schedule Basics (pagerduty.com)
• Schedule Examples (pagerduty.com)
• Schedules in Third-Party Apps (pagerduty.com)

Required Permissions

Configuration

Create a Schedule

1. Go to People > On-Call Schedules and select New On-Call Schedule
2. Enter a Name and a Description (optional)
   1. Follow the naming standard of ITS_<Department>_Primary, Secondary or Tertiary
3. Select a team to assign the schedule to (optional, only advanced permissions can do this)
4. Ensure time zone is correct (UTC Eastern)
5. Step 1: Add Users: in the dropdown, select users you’d like to add to the rotation of the schedule
   1. On-call rotation is from top to bottom
   2. Drag users to adjust the order
   3. If a user does not appear in the dropdown, admin users can add users to account
   4. All users can be added to schedules (aside from limited and full stakeholders)
6. Step 2: Set Up an On-Call Rotation: in the dropdown, select how frequently users from Step 1 change on-call responsibility
   1. Daily, weekly or custom
   2. For custom rotations, you must enter a value for the length of the shift (hours, days, weeks) and the Handoff time (time when the schedule will rotate to the next on-call user)
   3. Optional: select Restrict on-call shifts to specific times - this limits on-call duty to specific times (This is useful if your team doesn’t want to be on-call during the weekends, for example)
7. Step 3: Start Time for This Layer: start time is automatically populated from Step 2
   1. Can be changed to a future date/time
8. Review the Final Schedule at the bottom of the page
9. IMPORTANT: You must next connect the schedule to an escalation policy, so that on-call users will be notified about the proper service. If you fail to do this, notifications will not be sent to on-call users in the schedule

Usage

Add Users to an Existing Schedule

1. Go to People > On-call Schedules and select the 3 dots to the right of your schedule > select Edit
2. Use the Select a User dropdown to find and a select new user(s)
3. Select Save Schedule

Remove Users From an Existing Schedule

1. Go to People > On-call Schedules and select the 3 dots to the right of your schedule > select Edit
2. Under Add Users, select the X next to the name of the user you want to remove
3. Select Save Schedule

​Copy a Schedule

1. Go to People > On-call Schedules and select the 3 dots to the right of your schedule > select Duplicate
   1. This new copy will have the same users and settings from previous schedule
2. Add a new Name and make edits where necessary
3. Select Create Schedule

​Create Overrides

1. ​For a specific schedule shift, go to People > On-Call Schedules
2. When you see your schedule, click directly on the shift that you’d like to override (the colored bar with a user’s name)
3. The Create an Override pop-up will appear
4. Select the override details: the Person, when it Starts and when it Ends
5. Select Create Override
   1. This is extremely useful if one of your team members is going on vacation and there needs to be a temporary override
6. ​To override any span of time on the schedule level, Go to People > On-call Schedules and select the 3 dots to the right of your schedule > select Edit
7. Select Schedule an Override and fill in the details: Person, Starts on and Ends on
8. Select Create Override
   1. This is useful if you want to override an entire schedule for a period of time

Delete an Override

1. Go to People > On-call Schedules and select your schedule
2. On the right-hand side of the page under Upcoming Overrides, select the X next to the user’s name

Delete a Schedule

1. Go to People > On-Call Schedules and select your schedule
2. On the right-hand side of the page, select the red box Delete this Schedule
3. Confirm your selection