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On-call tells SRE Agent who holds the pager now, pages that person when an alert needs a human, and keeps paging until someone acknowledges. Every role can open On-call and see who is on call. Organization admins create and edit schedules. Any member can cover shifts. See Cover a shift for the exact rules.
On-call page with the Primary on-call weekly rotation, an empty Recent notifications card, and a month calendar of shifts for three people with override markers

The On-call page shows the rotation and who is on call now. The calendar below it marks overrides, and Recent notifications stay empty until a page, shift reminder or override notice is sent.

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Create a schedule and its rotation

1

Add the schedule

Go to On-call and click New schedule. Fill in Name, Timezone (IANA) such as America/New_York, and Rotation: Daily, Weekly or Custom (then Days per rotation). A weekly rotation also takes a Handoff weekday.
2

Set the handoff

Enter the Handoff time (local, 24h HH:MM) and Starts on (YYYY-MM-DD). Nobody is on call before the start date. Leave Enabled ticked and click Save.
3

Build the roster

On the schedule’s card click Roster. Click + email to add members, use the arrows to set the order (the first person takes the first shift), then click Save roster.

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What you see

Each schedule card shows On call now. The answer is worked out each time from the roster, the rotation and any overrides, so an edit takes effect immediately. Handoffs happen at the local time in the schedule’s own timezone, so a daylight saving change makes a shift 23 or 25 hours instead of silently drifting. A member who leaves the organization or is disabled is skipped when their shift comes up, and the next person on the roster takes it.

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Cover a shift

An override puts someone else on call for a window, for example “Ana covers for Ben from Friday 18:00 to Monday 09:00”.
1

Open the calendar

Click Calendar on the schedule’s card. Use Prev, Today and Next to change month.
2

Pick the days

Click a day. A panel lists every shift on it with exact start and end times, who holds it, and whether it comes from the rotation or an override. To cover several days, click Select range, then click the last day.
3

Cover them

Click Cover these days. The form opens prefilled from the first handoff to the handoff after your last day. Fill in Who covers, adjust Starts and Ends (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM, in the schedule’s timezone) and add Reason (optional). The form shows what the override replaces before you save. Click Save override.
Add override at the bottom of the calendar opens the same form blank. An override covers at most 90 days. Overridden spans carry an override badge on the calendar, and Edit and Remove appear in the day panel for the ones you may change. Any member can cover their own shift: you are the covering person and can edit or remove overrides where you are the covering person. Naming someone else, or changing an override that covers someone else, needs an organization admin.

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Send pages to the person on call

On-call does nothing by itself until an alert reaches the schedule.
  1. Go to Settings, Outbound Alerting and click Add Config. Set Provider Type to On-call schedule and choose the schedule under On-call schedule.
  2. Click Add Rule to say which alerts page it: match on source, severity or labels, and set Escalate after (minutes) to wait before paging or leave it empty to page at once.
  3. To mention the person on call in the Slack thread of a service’s alerts, set Mention on call (optional) on that service’s route under Settings, Notifications, Per-Service Alert Channels.
To choose how people are told and how to acknowledge a page, see Notifications and acknowledging pages.