> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.whawit.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Guided setup

> Stand up WHAWIT on-call from a short description of your team — WHAWIT proposes the escalation teams, schedules and policies, and you review before anything is created

## Let WHAWIT propose it

Building a first on-call configuration by hand means inventing a rotation, a
handoff hour, an escalation chain and a set of timeouts before you have any feel
for how they behave. WHAWIT will propose the whole thing instead — **escalation
teams, schedules and escalation policies** — and hand it to you to review before
anything is created.

Go to **On Call → Configuration** and start the guided setup. (Creating an
individual on-call agent is a separate flow — **New Oncall** on the
[agents screen](/on-call/agents).)

## Step 1 — who is on the roster

Three ways to tell WHAWIT who is involved:

<CardGroup cols={3}>
  <Card title="From your directory" icon="users">
    Uses the people already in your organization, both active members and those
    with pending invitations. The fastest option if your team is already in
    WHAWIT.
  </Card>

  <Card title="From a list of emails" icon="at">
    Paste addresses. Anyone who is not yet an organization member is collected
    into a list of people to invite, so nobody ends up on a rotation they cannot
    log in to.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Describe it" icon="wand-magic-sparkles">
    Write what you want in plain language — who covers what, which hours matter,
    how many tiers — and let WHAWIT work out the shape.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

<Note>
  Whoever ends up in a rotation must be an organization member. The **list of
  emails** mode surfaces the ones who are not, so you can invite them as part of
  the same setup rather than discovering the gap when a page fails to route.
</Note>

## Step 2 — a few questions

| Question                    | What it decides                                                                                                                           |
| --------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Timezone**                | The schedule's own timezone. Handoffs and coverage hours are evaluated in it, so pick the one the team actually works in.                 |
| **Rotation type**           | `daily`, `weekly`, or `custom` with a shift length in hours. Weekly suits most teams; custom is for shift-based coverage.                 |
| **Handoff time**            | The local time of day a shift changes hands, such as `09:00`.                                                                             |
| **Tiers**                   | `single` for one rotation, `two-tier` for primary plus secondary, or `follow-the-sun` for regional coverage handing off around the clock. |
| **Acknowledgement timeout** | How many minutes a level waits before escalating.                                                                                         |
| **Repeat**                  | How many times to re-run the whole chain if nobody acknowledges.                                                                          |

<Tip>
  If you are unsure about the timeout, start shorter than feels comfortable. A
  ten-minute level that escalates unnecessarily is a minor annoyance; a
  forty-five-minute one that lets an outage sit is not.
</Tip>

## Step 3 — review the proposal

WHAWIT returns a complete proposed configuration:

* **Escalation teams** — the groups it thinks make sense from your roster.
* **Schedules** — layers, rotation, timezone and handoff, with coverage
  restrictions where the tier choice implies them.
* **Escalation policies** — ordered levels with targets, timeouts and channels,
  and the repeat you asked for.
* **Users to invite** — anyone on the roster who is not yet a member.

Nothing is created until you accept it. Change anything that does not match how
your team actually works — the proposal is a starting point, not a verdict.

## Step 4 — verify before you rely on it

This is the part worth not skipping. Four checks, in order of how often they
catch something:

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="Preview every policy, at an awkward hour">
    Preview resolves a policy against the current rotations and overrides and
    shows exactly who would be paged at each level. Run it at 03:00 on a weekend,
    not during business hours — that is where the gaps are. A level that resolves
    to nobody is the failure you are looking for.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Look at a full week of shifts">
    View the upcoming shifts across seven days. If coverage restrictions across
    your layers do not quite meet, there is a window where the schedule resolves
    to nobody, and it will not be obvious from the configuration alone.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Check every user has a phone number">
    WhatsApp and SMS deliver to the number on the user's profile. A user without
    one is skipped for those channels while the escalation continues on the
    others — so an SMS level can be silently useless. Fill them in.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Confirm one policy is the organization default">
    The default is the fallback for any incident raised by something with no
    policy of its own. Without it, such an incident has no escalation path at
    all.
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## Adjusting later

Nothing here is permanent. Schedules, layers, rotations, restrictions,
overrides, policies, levels and channels are all editable after the fact, and
preview lets you check the effect of a change before an incident does. Most
teams tighten their timeouts and add a secondary tier within the first month —
that is the system working, not a sign the initial setup was wrong.

## Related

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="On-call features" icon="list-check" href="/on-call/features">
    The full capability list.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Schedules and rotations" icon="calendar" href="/on-call/schedules">
    The concepts behind the questions above.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Escalation policies" icon="arrow-up-right-dots" href="/on-call/escalation-policies">
    Levels, targets, timeouts and preview.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Migrating" icon="right-left" href="/on-call/migrating">
    Coming from PagerDuty or Opsgenie.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>