WWarnFireDocs

Incident response

On-call schedules

Set up who is on call and when, using rotations, layers, and vacation overrides.

A schedule is a calendar that answers one question at any moment: who should be paged right now?

You’ll find schedules under On-call → Schedules. Each schedule card shows On call now — the live answer — plus a preview of the next two weeks of handoffs.

Create a schedule

  1. Open On-call → Schedules.
  2. In the New schedule panel, give it a name and pick a timezone.
  3. Fill in the first layer (explained below): when it starts, how long each person’s shift is (hours, days, or weeks), and the responders in rotation order.
  4. Press Create schedule.

People take turns automatically. With a 7-day shift and three people, each person covers one week, then hands off to the next.

Layers, in plain terms

A layer is one rotation. Most teams need only one. You add more layers when different groups of people cover different times:

  • Business hours + nights: Layer 1 covers 09:00–17:00 on weekdays (using the Active from / Active until times and weekday picker). Layer 2 covers everything else.
  • Follow-the-sun: a European layer active during their day, an American layer active during theirs.

When more than one layer is active at the same moment, everyone on call from those layers is paged together.

Overrides — “I’ll cover for you”

An override is temporary cover: vacation, an appointment, a swap. It doesn’t rewrite the rotation — it simply says “between these times, page this person instead.”

  1. On the Schedules page, find the Add override panel.
  2. Choose the schedule (and one layer, or all layers).
  3. Pick who is covering, and from when to when.
  4. Press Add override.

Overrides show up in orange on the coverage preview, and in the Active and upcoming overrides list where they can be removed.

Good to know

  • “Uncovered” is a warning, not a crash. If a schedule has a gap, the Overview page flags it before it bites you. Fix the layer times or add an override.
  • Changing a schedule never affects an incident that’s already paging. The plan was frozen when that incident opened.
  • Deleting or disabling a schedule that a live escalation policy depends on is blocked — WarnFire won’t let you quietly break your own paging.