On-call scheduling
Stage in the incident loop: PAGEOn-call scheduling, traceable to who is actually on it.
A rotation is a promise made months in advance by people who will not remember making it. CallHeim keeps that promise legible: layers, overrides and time off compose into one resolved answer, and a coverage gap shows up in the console instead of staying silent until 3 a.m.
- Mon
- Tue
- Wed
- Thu
- Fri
- Sat
- Sun
- John
- John
- John
- Sarah
- Sarah
- Michael
- Michael
- Emily
- John
- John
- John
- Emily
- Sarah
- Michael
- Michael
How it works
Teams own schedules; schedules resolve to one person.
Teams with member rosters own schedules and link to escalation policies. Schedules use any IANA time zone.
Layers stack
Each layer has its own restriction — weekdays, nights, a follow-the-sun band — its own rotation length and its own roster. The topmost layer covering a moment decides who is on call at that moment.
An override wins
An Override sits above every layer for its window, so covering a shift does not require editing the rotation everyone else depends on.
Escalation reads it
A schedule answers “who”. An Escalation Policy answers “and if they don’t answer?” The two are separate objects, so changing your rotation does not mean rebuilding your escalation strategy.
Gaps are visible
Coverage gaps are shown in the console; they are not alerted in advance.
On-call schedule: rotation layers and the final schedule they produce, in any time zone. Coverage gaps are shown in the console; they are not alerted in advance. (example data).
Exceptions
Real life, as records the paging engine reads.
Overrides, swaps, time off and coverage gaps are first-class records, not a comment in a spreadsheet — and the paging engine reads them, so a covered shift is actually covered.
Override
A named person covers a named window, above every layer. The most common operation, made cheap.
Swap Request
One responder asks a schedule manager to approve another responder taking a shift, with the approver recorded.
Time Off
Absence, including one entry that can cover a company-wide shutdown across every schedule at once.
Coverage gaps
Coverage gaps are shown in the console; they are not alerted in advance.
Rotation assist
When you run it, it orders the roster using how much each person has already been paged, and proposes balancing changes for you to review before they apply.
Configuration history
Changes to schedules, layers, overrides and time off are recorded in the audit log.
Only swap requests carry a formal approval step. Overrides and time off are direct changes, and every one of them is recorded in the audit log.
Fatigue
A fairness number you can audit.
A published on-call fatigue score: 0.40 sleep-window interruptions, 0.30 volume, 0.20 off-hours, 0.10 severity, over a rolling 14 days. It is a heuristic over your own paging history, not a wellbeing measure.
- The sleep window is 22:00–07:00, the same for everyone.
- When you run rotation assist, the fatigue scores decide who goes first.
- Read the weighting in full on incident intelligence.
The four factors
- 0.40
Interruptions inside the sleep window
- 0.30
Page volume, normalised per week
- 0.20
Pages outside working hours
- 0.10
Severity pressure — the share that were high severity
Portability
Follow-the-sun, and a way in from elsewhere.
- A follow-the-sun template builds time-banded layers for a schedule that hands off by region.
- Import tooling (early access) reads your PagerDuty or Opsgenie configuration (US-region accounts); an optional dry run lets you review the result before anything is written to your workspace. Read the migration guide →
Tiers
Who gets escalated, and how far.
Escalation policies have up to 8 tiers, per-tier timeouts from 1 to 240 minutes, and a mandatory fallback target.
Escalation policies are the object that answers “and if they don’t answer?” — timeouts, tiers and a mandatory fallback are configured there, not on the schedule itself.
Put a rule you can read between your alerts and your on-call.
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