Create on-call schedules in Grafana OnCall
Schedules allow you to map out recurring on-call coverage and automate the escalation of alert notifications to currently on-call users. With Grafana OnCall, you can customize rotations with a live schedule preview to visualize your schedule, add users, reorder users, and reference teammates’ time zones.
To learn more, see On-call schedules which provides the fundamental concepts for this task.
Before you begin
- Users with Admin or Editor roles can create, edit and delete schedules.
- Users with Viewer role cannot receive alert notifications, therefore, cannot be on-call.
For more information about permissions, refer to Manage users and teams for Grafana OnCall
Create an on-call schedule
To create a new on-call schedule:
- In Grafana OnCall, navigate to the Schedules tab and click + New schedule
- Navigate to Set up on-call rotation schedule and click + Create
- Provide a name and review available schedule settings
- When you’re done, click Create Schedule
Note: You can edit your schedule settings at any time.
Add a rotation to your on-call schedule
After creating your schedule, you can add rotations to build out your coverage needs. Think of a rotation as a recurring schedule containing on-call shifts that users rotate through.
To add a rotation to an on-call schedule:
- From your newly created schedule, click + Add rotation and select New Layer.
- Complete the rotation creation form according to your rotation parameters.
- Add users to the rotation from the dropdown. You can separate users into user groups to rotate through individual users per shift. User groups that contain
- multiple users results in all users in the group being included in corresponding shifts.
- When you’re satisfied with the rotation preview, click Create.
Add an on-call schedule to escalation chains
Now that you’ve created your schedule, it must be referenced in the steps of an escalation chain for on-call users to receive alert notifications.
To connect a schedule to an escalation chain:
- In Grafana OnCall, go to the Escalation Chains tab.
- Navigate to an existing escalation chain or click + New Escalation Chain.
- Select Notify users from on-call schedule from the Add escalation step dropdown.
- Specify which notification policy to use and the appropriate schedule.
- Click and drag the escalation steps to reorder, if needed.
Escalation chain steps are saved automatically.
For more information about Escalation Chains, refer to Configure and manage Escalation Chains
