It’s the holiday season! ✨ This period may bring some increased demand, coupled with potential staffing shortages due to team members taking well-deserved breaks. That’s why crafting an effective on-call schedule becomes crucial to ensure continuous service availability.
With all this in mind, we’re rolling out a new feature:
🚀 Schedule Layer Copy 🚀
The new Schedule Layer Copy feature allows users to duplicate an entire layer configuration within a schedule or to copy specific components of an existing layer into a new one. This speeds up the schedule creation process and addresses different scheduling and rotation needs.
Learn how to best leverage this new feature from Sr. Product Manager @kara smith:
By using the new Schedule Layer Copy, teams can better streamline on-call management during the holiday season, and ensure a smooth and well-coordinated response to incidents!
Here are some other best practices for on-call teams during the holiday season:
Create override schedules: prepare for unexpected changes by having override schedules in place, enabling quick adjustments to the on-call rotation.- Do short assignments: a day or two - vs having someone on for the whole week if you can (some of PD engineering teams, with 48 hour rotations)
Customize notification rules settings based on team members’ availability during the holidays, preventing unnecessary alerts.- Encourage PagerDuty Mobile App usage and Slack as a contact method.
- Use Analytics to analyze post-holiday performance: review reports and analytics to assess the effectiveness of the on-call strategy and identify areas for improvement in future holiday seasons.
Now that you know how to use the new Schedule Layer Copy and have reviewed some best practices, we’d like to know: