Basic vacation/OOO management

[Markus Muehlberger]

Hi,

We're trying to get very basic holiday management implemented with Opsgenie.

Before Opsgenie (on a spreadsheet) we had multiple schedules where we cycle through team members. If a team member is on holiday or OOO due to sickness, we would shift all slots to the left to cover for them but still have the same rotation. They'd be added back in when they're back.

We've considered a couple of solutions:

• Overrides don't work for that, because we'd have to pick someone to do an extra slot, rather than just shifting it.
• Removing the person from the rotation doesn't really work, because the whole rotation shifts from when it originally started (if we don't change the start date), rather than only changing the shifts in the future.

I feel like excluding a person from being scheduled for a certain amount of time would be a massively useful feature for a large number of users (and could possibly also be supported by integrations of HR systems).

Is there a timeline to add the ability to temporarily exclude someone from all schedules or is that not being considered at this moment?

[Connor Eyles]

Hi @Markus Muehlberger 

Great question!

You can take 2 approaches here based on your use case and suggestion here:

• Create an override on the schedule for "no-one" 
• Setup forwarding rules for the user that is OOO

The first approach is going off your suggestion to exclude a person from being scheduled rather than picking another person. This being said it might become more complicated if you have a complex schedule and might miss important notifications.

The second approach here might be the better option for you, what you can do is setup forwarding rules (either for yourself or another user).

In some situations users may not be able participate in on-call schedule rotations or respond to alerts in general. For these situations, Opsgenie allows users to create a "notification forwarding" rule to forward their alert notifications to another user for a specified time frame.

Forwarding rules can be found on Settings -> Forwarding rules, under the My Profile section.

https://support.atlassian.com/opsgenie/docs/add-a-forwarding-rule/

Let me know if this is helpful :)

Thanks,
Connor

[Karthick Ramalingam]

Hi,
I have similar question, but don't seem to find any better way to do this currently.

Is there a way to temporarily disable a user from the schedule while they are on vacation?

As Markus mentioned if we remove that person from the on-call schedule they are removed entirely. 

I am surprised there is no better way to achieve excluding a person from schedule while on vacation. 
It is an important feature and should be part of any on-call scheduling software.

If I am missing something and there is alwady a feature let me know.

[Talar Pavlovic]

Hey there Karthick, 

Talar here from the Atlassian Team. 

The current process is to add the "no-one" override for anyone going on vacation - as described above. Although you may like to override their shifts with another person to ensure there isn't a gap in the rotation where there shouldn't be one. 

We do have a Feature Request for other functionality to be implemented in this vein - https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/OPSGENIE-1139 please feel free to comment on / vote for this FR as it will help its visibility with our Product and Engineering teams. 

Regards,
Talar 

[Karthick Ramalingam]

Adding n"no-one" means no one will be on-call during that time period. it doesnt move the shift to replace that person. And manually override the person for one shift is fine. We have daily shift change and doing a override manually on each day, figuring out whom to replace is not the best solution and not easy to manage.
Added comment to the FR