On-call schedules and escalation

Schedule time zones

Every schedule owns an IANA time zone and a local rotation start. A 09:00 handoff remains 09:00 in that schedule through daylight-saving changes.

Organization and personal time zones affect defaults and display. They do not silently change an existing schedule.

Only organization members with Responder on-call access can be added to a rotation, override, or shift trade. Stakeholders retain product access but are not eligible for alert routing.

Rotation patterns

Participants are evaluated in the displayed order.

A fixed schedule uses one coverage duration, such as seven days per responder. An alternating schedule repeats multiple durations, such as 4 / 3 days. The pattern advances to the next participant after each segment and repeats after the final segment.

Each segment must be between 1 and 28 coverage days. A pattern can contain up to 14 segments and a schedule can contain up to 100 unique participants.

Weekday exclusions and gaps

Choose the weekdays on which the rotation provides coverage. Excluded weekdays:

• have no rotation responder;
• do not advance the alternating pattern; and
• appear as gaps in the calendar.

The rotation start must fall on an included weekday. An exact schedule override can cover a normally excluded day.

Use this for schedules that deliberately operate only on certain weekdays. Do not exclude weekends from a 24×7 production schedule.

Scheduled participant changes

Each participant can have an optional joins at and leaves at instant. Firewatch recalculates the active participant list at those instants, allowing a future addition or removal without a precisely timed manual edit.

Review the future calendar after changing participant dates. Removing someone from the active roster changes subsequent rotation positions.

Overrides

An override assigns one organization member for an exact start and end time and supersedes the normal rotation. Overrides on the same schedule cannot overlap.

Use overrides for leave, temporary cover, or one-off gaps. They are different from changing the rotation because they do not rewrite future cadence.

Shift coverage and trades

Any member can request:

• coverage, where another member takes the requester’s shift; or
• a trade, where each member takes one of the other’s non-overlapping shifts.

The requester must own the entire offered rotation window. For a trade, the target must own the entire return window. Only the target can accept or decline, and only the requester can cancel while the request is pending.

Acceptance writes the corresponding schedule overrides atomically. Outstanding requests appear as a count next to Shift trades.

Month and week calendars

The Calendar page has directly linkable month and week views. Select a shift to inspect its schedule, responder, time range, source, and related services.

Holiday calendars add organization closures and early-close annotations to the calendar. They are informational overlays today: they do not remove or replace on-call coverage automatically. Use weekday exclusions or overrides when the rotation itself should change.

Built-in holiday calendars cannot be edited. Custom calendars can contain full closures or early-close events in their own time zone.

Escalation policies

A policy contains up to ten ordered steps:

• the first step is immediate;
• every later delay is relative to the preceding step; and
• a step can target a schedule, primary service owners, or all service owners.

When an incident is created, Firewatch writes every delayed step to its durable outbox. A schedule target is resolved when that step becomes due, so current overrides and effective participant changes are honored.

Acknowledging or resolving the incident prevents remaining steps from sending. The skipped work remains visible in the incident lifecycle instead of being silently deleted.

At each due step, Firewatch attempts all enabled delivery channels available for each targeted responder. It does not send email, then Slack, then phone as three separate policy steps unless you model separate responder targets yourself.