Introduction

In this guide, we'll walk you step-by-step through creating a moderately complex schedule with PagerDuty's on-call scheduling system.  The schedule will have three different teams on-call at different times of the day and the week.  In scheduling jargon, this kind of schedule is known as follow-the-sun schedule. 

Requirements

In this schedule, we'll have three teams. The first team, the US team, will consist of Tim Wright, Matt Nordstrom and Jason Collision. They'll be on-call during weekdays from 8am - 8pm PST and they will rotate on a weekly basis.

The second team, the Indian team, will consist of Abinav Shah and Raj Kumar. They'll be on-call during the weekdays starting at 8pm until 8am the next day.

The third team will cover the weekends, and it will consist Tim Wright, Matt Nordstrom, Jason Collision, Abinav Shah and Raj Kumar (basically everyone in team and 1 and 2). The person on-call during the weekend will cover the whole weekend and will be rotated on a weekly basis. For the sake of clarity, let's define weekend to start at 8pm PST on Friday until 8pm PST on Sunday.

Creating a schedule

Add everyone who is going to be part of the on-call as a user in PagerDuty before proceeding with this section.

Now we know the requirements for the schedule, let's go and create one in PagerDuty.

1. Start by going to the "On-Call Schedules" tab and click on the "New On-Call Calendar"

2. Enter a name for the schedule; let's call it US-India (don't worry, if you don't like it, you can change it later).

3. Select a time zone for the schedule; all times that you'll select will be local to this time zone.

Adding the first team (US Team)

1. Add all of the US Team members by clicking on the "Add User" link in "Schedule Layer 1".

2. Select "weekly" as the rotation type.

3. Check the "on-call shift to specific times..." checkbox to restrict on-call shifts for this team.

4. In the popup that follows, select "Restrict on-call duty to specific times-of-the-day" and enter 08:00 to 20:00 (8am - 8pm).

5. Click the apply button to apply restrictions to the team.

Adding the second team (Indian Team)

Let's add the second team (Indian Team) to the on-call schedule.

1. Click on the "Add Another Layer" button and add all members of the second team.

2. Select "weekly" as the rotation type.

3. Restrict the on-call shifts to be from 20:00 to 08:00 (8pm to 8am next day)

Adding the third team (Weekend Team)

Let's add the third team (Weekend Team) to the on-call schedule.

1. Click on the "Add Another Layer" button and add all members of the third team.

2. Select "weekly" as the rotation type.

3. Restrict the on-call shifts to be from Friday 20:00 to Sunday 20:00 (8pm Friday to 8pm Sunday).

4. Set the schedule start date to be on a Friday such that it coincides with the start of the weekend rotation (otherwise you'll have a shift handoff during the middle of the weekend)

5. Click the "Create Schedule" button to create the schedule.