Schedules

Hotpot's on-call schedules.

A schedule is for a group of people who are on-call for the same thing.

Scheduler overview

Here's a high-level graphic explaining how Hotpot's schedule settings interact.

Notifications progress through each of Hotpot's stages before finally carrying out whatever terminal behavior your define.

Schedules and teams

Today, a Hotpot team can have a single schedule. If your team has different needs, let us know!

Creating a Schedule

Creating a schedule is an optional part of creating a team. If you haven't already, see the docs for creating a team!

After creating a team, you will automatically be asked about creating 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 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 will act as the backstop for this schedule.	This is really important!
Prepare lead time	The lead time before the end of a stint at which an on-call person will be asked to prepare for handoff.
Copy these users on all pages	Any users here will be simultaneously notified for any notification in this schedule.	This is commonly used to keep someone informed about a schedule.
Stint 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 stint if needed to fulfill the schedule.
Stint 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 will automatically escalate.	You probably want this!
Create moments from Pages	Whenever a page is handled Hotpot will create 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 will require 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?

Multistage schedules

Multistage alerts are in development.

Adding users to the schedule

Your next step is choosing which users will be a 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, which adds the user to the pool.

Fitness and ineligible users

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 is not present, Hotpot will provide a reason. An example is someone who hasn't entered a phone number when the schedule requires one.