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What a schedule is

A WHAWIT on-call schedule is a named rotation that answers one question: who is responsible right now? It has its own IANA timezone — for example America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires or Europe/Madrid — and every handoff, restriction and shift boundary is evaluated in that timezone, not in the viewer’s. A schedule is made of layers. Each layer is an ordered list of people who rotate through shifts independently of the other layers. A common setup is two layers, Primary and Secondary, where the second exists to catch what the first misses.

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Creating a schedule

1

Name it and pick the timezone

Go to On-Call → Schedules and create a schedule. The timezone you choose governs handoff times and any coverage restrictions you add later. Pick the timezone the team actually works in.
2

Add a layer

Give the layer a name — Primary, Secondary, Weekend — and add its members in the order they should rotate. The order matters: it is the sequence shifts are handed off in.
3

Choose the rotation

Set the rotation to daily, weekly, or custom. A custom rotation takes a shift length in hours, which is how you build 8-hour or 12-hour follow-the-sun coverage.
4

Set the anchor and the handoff time

The start date anchors the rotation — it is the beginning of the first member’s first shift. The handoff time, such as 09:00, is the local time of day a shift changes hands.
5

Check who it resolves to

Open the schedule and look at the current on-call and the upcoming shifts. This is the check worth doing before an incident rather than during one.

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Rotation types

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Restrictions — partial coverage

By default a layer covers the clock. A restriction narrows it to specific days and hours, so the layer only puts someone on call inside that window. Outside it, the layer yields nobody and escalation moves past it. A restriction is a set of days of the week plus a start and end time, evaluated in the schedule’s timezone. The end time may be earlier than the start time, which is how you express a window that crosses midnight — 22:00 to 06:00 is one continuous overnight shift, not an empty range.
Restrictions are how you build a schedule where a business-hours layer handles the day and a smaller overnight layer handles the night, without maintaining two separate schedules.

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Overrides — time off and swaps

An override substitutes a person into a specific time window, replacing whoever the rotation would otherwise have selected. Use them for vacation, illness, or a swap between two engineers.
  • An override has a user, a start, an end, and an optional note explaining why it exists.
  • Scope it to a single layer to replace just the primary, or leave the layer unset to override every layer in the schedule for that window.
  • Overrides win over the rotation for their window, and the rotation resumes untouched afterwards.
An override that covers every layer means exactly that: for its window, the entire schedule resolves to one person. If you meant to cover only the primary shift, scope the override to that layer.

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Reading the schedule

Once a schedule exists you can ask it three things:
  • Who is on call right now, across one schedule or all of them.
  • Who is on call at a given moment, which is what the escalation engine itself calls when an incident fires.
  • The shifts across a future window, so you can see the rotation laid out before it happens and spot a gap while there is still time to fix it.
Each answer identifies the person, the layer they came from, the start and end of their shift, and whether they were selected by the rotation or by an override.

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What to check before you rely on it

Handoffs and restrictions are evaluated in the schedule’s timezone. A schedule created in the wrong timezone will hand off at the wrong local hour, and the mistake is invisible until someone is paged at the wrong time.
If every layer has restrictions and none of them cover, say, Sunday mornings, the schedule resolves to nobody in that window. Look at the upcoming shifts across a full week before trusting it.
Members rotate in the order they are listed. Reordering after the anchor date changes who is up next, so check the upcoming shifts after any edit.

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Next

Escalation policies

Point an escalation chain at the schedule you just built.

Notifications

Choose how the people on that schedule get reached.