Docs » Create and manage on-call schedules

Create and manage on-call schedules 🔗

When an incident occurs, it is important to contact a responder who understands that part of the system architecture to fix the problem. You can accomplish this through scheduling. An on-call schedule consists of a rotating group of responders that are assigned shifts for incident response. Use an on-call schedule as a step in your incident workflows.

Create an on-call schedule

Follow these steps to create a schedule. See On-call schedule scenarios for steps to create specific schedule scenarios.

  1. In Incident Intelligence, select Incident Management.
  2. Select the On-call schedules tab.
  3. Select Create new schedule.
  4. Select the pencil icon to edit the schedule name. Name your schedules so that they are easy to find when adding them to an incident workflow. For example, include a team name, a priority (for example, primary, secondary, and so on), and what is being covered (for example, database, web, and so on). Select the checkmark icon to save your schedule name.
  5. (Optional) Add a teams tag if you want to associate your schedule with a team. The teams tag makes finding a schedule in an incident workflow easier. It also sorts the team members at the top of the responder list when adding responders to your schedule shifts. To add a teams tag, enter the team name in the Teams tag field and select the team when it appears.
  6. Enter a shift name. Shift names often refer to time (for example, business hours, weekends, and so on).
  7. Select a shift start date. The shift begins on the day you select in Shift starts on. Shifts within the same can have independent start dates.
  8. Use the timezone picker to select the timezone for the coverage. The times in the schedule preview reflect this selection, not your local timezone.

  9. Define your shift coverage. As you configure a new shift, refer to the Schedule Preview to confirm that you configured your schedule as intended. The schedule preview includes schedule info for up to one year. Select Next Month and Previous Month to navigate the schedule preview.

    Shift coverage type

    Shift coverage description

    Steps

    Day-by-day shift coverage

    Day-by-day shifts are configured to span 24 hours on select days of the week. This option is best if you want to create short-term shifts that are staggered on specific days of the week, with responders rotating on a more frequent basis.
    1. Select the days of the week you want to set up coverage for.
    2. Select the Daily start time and Daily end time. If you want to set up 24-hour coverage, select Create 24 hr shifts.

    Week-by-week shift coverage

    Week-by-week shifts are configured over one week and repeat every week. This option is best if you want to create a long-term shift that spans the course of two to seven days, with responders rotating on a less frequent basis.
    1. Select the day and time you want the shift to start in the Starts on drop-down lists.
    2. Select the day and time you want the shift to end in the Ends on drop-down lists.
  10. Under Customize shift handoff, select the number of shifts that you want to elapse before a handoff to the next team member in the schedule list. Increasing this number increases the number of times a responder is repeated in the schedule until the next responder is on call. For example, week-by-week coverage with a shift handoff of 2 creates a biweekly shift. Day-by-day coverage with a shift handoff of 2 keeps a responder on-call for 2 shift days until the next responder is on call.
  11. Under Add responders, add one or more team members to the shift. You can add responders to a shift more than once.
    1. Enter team member names and select them when they appear. If you added a teams tag, the team members from this team are listed at the top of this drop-down list. Select Add all members from [TEAM] to quickly add all the team members from that team. The ALL section of the team member list comes from the Observability Cloud user list. See Create and manage users in Splunk Observability Cloud for more info.
    2. Drag responders in the list to reorder.
  12. Select Save shift. Shifts are added to the SAVED SHIFTS list under the schedule name. You must have at least one shift saved per schedule. To edit a previously-saved shift, select the pencil icon next to the shift. To delete a shift select the trash icon next to the shift.
  13. Repeat these steps to add shifts to the schedule as needed. Select Back to all schedules when you are finished adding shifts to your on-call schedule.

After you save your shifts, review the schedule details in the Schedule Preview to confirm that you’ve configured your schedule shifts as intended. The schedule preview includes schedule info for up to one year. Select Next Month and Previous Month to navigate the schedule preview. Select Back to all schedules when you are finished adding shifts to your on-call schedule.

Now that you’ve created an on-call schedule, add it to the incident workflow for your web application incident policy. See Configure incident workflows for your incident policy.

Note

You can edit the schedule if you need to make broader changes than a single shift reassignment. After saving changes to the shift schedule, a dialog displays to inform you of any shifts that might be impacted by your changes. The list displays the potentially impacted users and shifts over the next 90 days so you can adjust shift assignments as needed.

See also