pagerdutyduty - generating PagerDuty schedules

Scheduling on-call schedules has always been a bit of a pain, especially given the way we rotate shifts. PagerDuty’s interface really only satisfies one type of on-call schedule: scheduling people manually for multi-day or week-long blocks of 24/7 coverage.

At Olark, we prefer to have our on-call schedule rotate through people much more rapidly, in several hour blocks. This enables us to spread the obligation out a bit more fairly, and have the whole team as backup — plus it enables us to give every team member the guarantee that they’ll be free at least 6 hours every night.

The only real downside to this approach is that creating the schedule involves quite a bit of manual planning to put together. Not to mention, if you hire a new team member (something we like to do ) your whole schedule is invalid and needs to be recalculated and recreated.

Unfortunately in PagerDuty, there’s no way to temporarily remove someone from the on-call schedule (non- destructively). So if someone goes on vacation for two weeks — same thing, the whole schedule is invalid, as long as they’re scheduled, but not available.

To scratch this itch, we built pagerdutyduty , a tool that reads in a YAML file specifying your team members, their on/off hours, and the layers of your on-call schedule you’d like to fill.

Via the PagerDuty API, pagerdutyduty will create the perfect on-call schedule given your criteria. For example, let’s say you want your ops team on call 24/7 in rotating four hour blocks. Just create an on-call layer in YAML like so:

layers:
    \- name: ops1
      source: ops
      respect_offhours: False
      block_size: 4

And you want the whole engineering team as backup 24/7 (but giving people at least 6 hours off each night, according to time zone) in rotating one hour blocks:

layers:
    \- name: everyone1
    source: engineering
    block_size: 4

But make sure not to schedule Julie, since she’s on vacation:

users:
    \- id: P8EI9BL
    offhours: [EST]
    tags: [engineering]
    vacation: True
`

Run pagerdutyduty with your PagerDuty API access key, and voilà, you’ve got a schedule that matches your criteria. Check out the Github page for the project , or pip install pagerdutyduty. Right now the project satisfies our narrow use-case, but could possibly be a great place to start building something to satisfy yours!