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Dear PagerDuty Community,

We’ve been struggling to configure our PagerDuty schedule for a team of exactly 10 developers, with two on-call shifts per workday (10 shift slots per week). This challenge was raised in the forum several years ago for 7 slots and 7 engineers, but it seems it hasn’t received enough attention from the PagerDuty team.

Here’s a simplified example to illustrate the problem:
Suppose, we have a team of 5 engineers - A, B, C, D, and E - and one on-call slot per workday. If we simply configure a schedule with these five engineers filling the five weekday slots, each engineer ends up with a fixed day every week (e.g., A always on Mondays, B always on Tuesdays, etc.). This is not desirable — we want the days to rotate so that A is on Monday in week one, Tuesday in week two, Wednesday in week three, and so on.

The only workable solution we’ve found so far is to manually create a long, repetitive list of people, such as:
ABCDE_BCDEA_CDEAB_DEABC_EABCD
This does achieve fair distribution, but it’s extremely tedious to maintain.

If we add a developer, we have to switch for ABCDEF. If someone leaves, we again have to spend significant time rearranging entries in the PagerDuty UI. While this might be manageable with 5 people, it becomes frustratingly inefficient with 10 engineers and 10 shifts per week. 

I would appreciate any thoughts or ideas on how to handle this issue more conveniently with the existing PagerDuty functionality. The most desirable outcome is, of course, a possibility to set up automatic cyclic rotation of the list of engineers weekly without necessity to specify the repetitive list.

Illia

Hi ​@illia.kaliuzhnyi,

Thank you very much for your detailed question. Looking at this similar recent post, I can see you’ve already applied the repeating users workaround solution, which I totally understand becomes a nightmare to maintain when adding and removing team members. 

I’ll make sure to share this with the team and see if we have any improvements on the roadmap. In the meanwhile I’ll summon ​@mwalls to look at your specific case, and see if there are any other ideas or workarounds for it.

Enjoy your day!

Hi ​@illia.kaliuzhnyi 

 

What you can do is create a different schedule layer for each day of the week. Use the restrictions to limit each layer to one day. The schedule effectively then combines to have a different person on call each day and then a different day each week. 

 

It’s still tedious to update, for sure. There are updates coming to scheduling that should make things more customizable, but I’m not sure of the release schedule. We’re very much looking forward to the changes ourselves. :) 

 

--mandi

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