List the people on call, choose how long a shift lasts and when it hands over. Get the schedule, a fairness check and a calendar file your team can subscribe to.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you enter here is sent to a server.
A rotation is fair when the unpleasant parts — nights, weekends, holidays — are shared evenly over time, and when everyone knows well in advance when their turn comes. The mechanics are simple: a fixed order, a fixed shift length and a fixed handoff time. Most of the trouble comes from the details around them.
Weekly shifts with a mid-morning handoff on a weekday are the common default. A whole week gives the on-call engineer enough context to follow up on recurring issues, and a daytime handoff means both people are awake to talk through what is still open.
A week suits quiet services. If the pager is noisy, shorter shifts of two or three days spread the load before anyone burns out.
Never at midnight and never on a Friday evening. Hand over during working hours, with ten minutes to walk through open issues.
Fewer than four people means on call more than one week in four, which is hard to sustain. Consider sharing a rotation with a neighbouring team.
With shifts shorter than a week, weekends can keep landing on the same person. Check the counts above and reorder or change the length if they drift.
Import the .ics file into Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar and share that calendar with the team, so the answer to "who is on call?" is always one click away. Times in the file are floating local times: each shift shows at the handoff hour you chose, in the viewer's own time zone setting. Pair the rotation with an escalation policy, so a missed page reaches a second person instead of nobody.
One week is the most common choice. Use shorter shifts when the alert volume is high, and avoid anything longer than a week without a break.
At least four for a sustainable 24/7 rotation, so that each person is on call no more than one week a month. Smaller teams should limit on-call hours or share coverage.
Yes. Download the .ics file and use Import in Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar. Each shift becomes one event titled with the person's name.
Agree that swaps are arranged between the two people and recorded in the shared calendar. For holidays, move that person's slot rather than skipping it, so the totals stay even.
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