How to set up a common rotation that supports multiple teams without duplicating the rotation?

[Eric Wang]

The scenario is that I have three separate teams under an organization that works in a common US time zone. I have a contracting team working in a different time zone which fits perfectly to use the follow-the-sun on-call model.

The question is how do I set that up?

I want to move to a world where

• Team 1 rotation starting 8 AM to 8 PM Eastern
• Team 2 rotation starting 8 AM to 8 PM Eastern
• Team 3 rotation starting 8 AM to 8 PM Eastern
• Team 4 rotation to fill in as a general guardian for Team 1,2, and 3 from 8 PM to 8 AM Eastern

[Tom Russell]

@Eric Wang are all users in the teams above part of the same Opsgenie Team? If they are separate Opsgenie teams, you could set up routing rules and escalations for Teams 1,2, & 3, that routed to team 4 from 8pm-8am. This would allow simple, independent rotations for each team.

[Eric Wang]

They are all separate teams in Opsgenie and I like your suggestion.

To paraphrase, Team1, 2, and 3 should have a team policy to forward all alerts to Team 4 from 8 PM to 8 AM ET. 

And instead of having rotations setup in each team, the person on-call will be 24x7 but due to the forwarding rule, they should not be paged from 8 PM onward.

[Dave Rosenlund]

Welcome to the community, @Eric Wang  👋

Have you seen this article by @Christian Beaulieu from the Opsgenie team:

               Follow The Sun On-Call Schedule in Opsgenie

-dave

[Eric Wang]

Thanks for sharing, but that's what I have set up currently. Due to organizational change, Team 4 needs to support all the teams during a specific time, and Team 1, 2, and 3 already exist as individual teams in Opsgenie. 

I want to avoid having to create a rotation to represent team 4 in each of the team's rotations if possible. Since updating Team 4's rotation will need to be manually updated across three places. 

[Christian Beaulieu]

Hey @Eric Wang ! and thanks for @ mentioning me @Dave Rosenlund 

It seems the best approach may be to create each rotation instead as a new Opsgenie Team, use Routing Rules and Escalation Policies and a single rotation for each of the 4 OG Teams. That way you can route alerts as needed, depending on time of day and escalate as needed :) 

[Eric Wang]

Team1, 2, and 3 support different services, and the org (for right or wrong) has separated each squad as its own team in Opsgenie. I'm hesitant to break that model unless I have to. 

I do like what was suggested above by @tom unless you have thoughts where that wouldn't work.