Temporary absence / vacation override mode

Question

Hi,

We often have need to put a temporary redirect on alert escalations - when people are away for a short time for an appointment, a day off, or they are just involved in a separate incident.

Does anyone know of an easy way of doing that? I'd like a feature where I just press a button to say 'I am unavailable for 4 hours' and it just goes immediately to the next point of escalation without me having to get someone else to take an override.

Thanks.

A.

Edward Ashforth · Answer

I did a schedule override per your suggestion with "no-one" but that resulted in the whole "BH" rotation having no one on call. See image below with a simpler 2 resource rotation, the final schedule has no one booked for the 24 hours a no-one override was applied.

In a larger team of 10 resources, how could we stop everyone pointing to everyone else? For example, resource 1 in a rota forward to resource 2, resource 2 points to resource 3, resource 3 points back to resource 1.

Alternatively, What about situations where resources are in different schedules/rotations because they have multiple skill set or responsibilities, but their combination of skills/teams/schedule are unique? For example resource 5 might be added to schedule a, b, c and g, each schedules on different teams (as that's how we identify skill), but other resources are only on schedule a, b and c. The single nominated person in the forward configuration might not have the skill/responsibility to solve anything that arrives in schedule/team 7.

Nick Haller · Answer

Hi @Edward Ashforth ,

Not that I'm aware of; make overrides be a subtractive action, rather than an additive/replacing action.

Would overriding resource 5 (with your example) solve that problem you're trying to solve. This is an actual option within Opsgenie:

This would avoid having to remove resource 5 from the rotation all together, and hope they add themselves back in when they're back in the office.

Otherwise it seems like resource 5 might benefit using a

forwarding rule to pass along all their notifications to another user: https://support.atlassian.com/opsgenie/docs/add-a-forwarding-rule/

Since these can be configured to end on a date/time, they wouldn't need to remember having to removing the rule.

Hope this helps! Let us know if you have any additional questions, issues, etc.

Edward Ashforth · Answer

@Nick Haller is there any plans to make overrides be a subtractive action, rather than an additive/replacing action?

For example, have a team of 10 resources doing a rotation every 1 hour. Next week, resource 5 is on vacation, so needs to be not included in the rotation.

From what I see with overrides now, i wouldn't be able to say "remove resource 5 temporarily from the rotation". I would need to either manually identify who's still left in the override, or remove resource 5 from the rotation all together, and hope they add themselves back in when they're back in the office.

For teams with large(ish) quantity of users, where we're trying to spread the responsibility across many resources, the idea of an override that only targets a single person doesn't fit our use case.