Create a round-robin on call schedule in Opsgenie

[Vinod Kaliappan]

Hello,

We have an Operations team with 4 team members and have a requirement to notify the team members of any alert in a round-robin fashion.

We do not want to have just one person manning the shift and instead need a pool of 4 members to get the alerts notified to them based on a round-robin fashion.

Is this possible with the On-Call schedule, notification policy and routing policy in Opsgenie?

Any help will be appreciated.

Thank you

[Nick Haller · Accepted solution]

Hi @Vinod Kaliappan ,

Round robin alerting is not possible at this time. It isn't possible to notify;

• Team Member A for Alert 1
• Team Member B for Alert 2
• Team Member C for Alert 3 (then restart the round robin)
• Team Member A for Alert 4
• Team Member B for Alert 5
• Team Member C for Alert 6
• etc.

It's been presented in the past, but engineering decided to instead implement notifying a random member of a team within an escalation - which does not factor in a round robin format.

The other option is adding all members into one rotation of a schedule, have them take on-call for a day, week, etc., and let Opsgenie manage automatically rotating the users so they have equals shifts - while escalating alerts to the schedule vs. a random member.

I understand with this option some members could receive more alerts than others, but it seems like the fairest option with distributing an equal length of on-call for your team members. 

[Vinod Kaliappan]

Thank you for the response Nick. I think notifying a random team member will the best option for now, although it cannot match the flexibility provided by the round-robin feature.

Is the "notify random member" designed to not notify the same team member multiple times in a row? 

Thank you

[Nick Haller]

That escalation rule is not designed for that; "not notify the same team member multiple times in a row."

If you have an escalation like the one below, it realistically could notify the same user multiple times in a sequence - since it is random.

Is it likely? No. But again, it's possible.

[Dan Rico]

I'm currently investigating this as it was a feature in PagerDuty that was quite useful.

[connor mcguane]

I would accomplish by first having each of your team members in their own schedule, so a Tom Schedule, Linda Schedule, etc.  Then your escalation policy would simply start with Tom, then after 5 minutes if Tom hasnt acked, go to Linda, etc.  Then you will need a Notification policy for this team.  This notification policy would restart an alert, essentially placing it back at the beginning with Tom, if its made it that far.

[Vinod Kaliappan]

Thank you for the response, Connor.

Wouldn't your suggestion mean that Tom will always get the alert first? I need to figure out a means by which if Tom got the first alert first, then the second alert goes to Linda, and so on.

The problem is that all 4 members of the team are in the same time zone and are available at the same time. So it would be best for us to be able to use some means to round-robin the alerts.

Thank you

[connor mcguane]

Youre correct (unfortunatley).  I think Nick's answer below of 'random' is probably as close as you'll get.