Create a schedule
With your tools and teams in place, you're ready to set up your schedule. A schedule is for a group of people who are on-call for the same thing.
This image shows how Hotpot's schedule settings interact. Notifications progress through each of Hotpot's stages before carrying out whatever terminal behavior you define.
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A Hotpot team has one schedule. If your team has different needs, let us know at help@hotpot.works!
Create a schedule
After creating a team, you're automatically asked to create a schedule. Yay! Let's talk about the settings you can adjust when building your schedule.
Schedule settings
Hey you! Hotpot is built with reasonable, healthy defaults but has a really powerful scheduler backend. Our goal is to keep the UI simple and approachable. Setting up on-call shouldn't be like trying to operate a nuclear reactor or something. Let us know at help@hotpot.works if something is missing here to craft your ideal setup!
| Field | Description | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Name | The name of the schedule. | Not very useful today, but later can be used to differentiate multiple schedules within the same team. |
| Description | Some text to help folks know what this schedule is for. | Fill this in with the scope of the schedule. What is this schedule responsible for? |
| Backstop | Set the user who acts as the backstop for this schedule. | This is really important! |
| Prepare lead time | The lead time before the end of a shift at which an on-call person is asked to prepare for handoff. | |
| Copy these users on all pages | Any users here are simultaneously notified for any notification in this schedule. | This is commonly used to keep someone informed about a schedule. |
| Shift length time | How long do you want each person to default to being on-call? | Hotpot may choose shorter on-call durations in a given shift if needed to fulfill the schedule. |
| Shift start weekday | On what day do you switch who is on-call? | |
| Handoff time | At what time do you switch who is on-call? | |
| Auto escalate | Determines if pages for this schedule automatically escalate. | You probably want this! |
| Create moments from pages | Whenever a page is handled, Hotpot creates a moment for you to triage later. | |
| Time to escalate | How long Hotpot should wait before escalating to the next stage in the schedule. | |
| Require coverage assignment acknowledgement | If enabled, Hotpot requires acknowledgement before coverage is considered accepted. | |
| Page repeat interval | If we reach the last person in an escalation path, how often should Hotpot bug that person? Infinitely? :) | Hotpot does not repeatedly page someone unless it has no other option. |
| Terminal behavior | What should Hotpot do when it reaches the end of an escalation? |
Add users to the schedule
Next, choose the users to be part of your schedule. Hotpot calls a collection of users a pool, treating them as a source to draw the next person. To add someone, click the plus sign next to their name.
To ensure users can be contacted, Hotpot verifies that they have all the appropriate settings and attributes to be successful in an on-call rotation. If a user isn't listed in the app (to be added to a schedule), Hotpot provides a reason. An example is someone who hasn't entered a phone number when the schedule requires one.