How to handle bank holidays?

[jbartlett86]

Hi,

We have just started using OpsGenie in anger over the last few months and as previously mentioned in this post we are setting up long lead time rotas across many teams and need to ensure that UK bank holidays can be directed to the "Non-Working Day" schedule we have created.

I can't see any way to do this still, has anything progressed around this feature request?

[Nick H]

Hi @jbartlett86 ,

At this time there is no update on that feature request (scheduled Routing Rules), but we'll be sure to reach out if there are any in the future.

In that shared post - my colleague, Emirhan, did suggest using overrides which is typically what we see most customers using to account for holidays. But if your use case requires routing alerts to a different schedule during holidays vs. no-one, I suppose you could use a combination of an Alert Policy + a Maintenance Policy to account for these unique days and who is on-call during them.

Alert policies can be used to modify alerts during creation - Ex: increase the priority, add tags, or in your case - add/remove responders (such as a team, escalation, schedule). These can be configured on both the global level or team level: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/global-policies

Maintenance policies provide the ability to enable or disable multiple policies, AND can be scheduled. These can also be configured on both the global or team level: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/maintenance

My idea is to create an Alert Policy that essentially strips any of the responders initially added to the alert during creation, then adds a Holiday (or specific) Schedule in replacement. While the Maintenance policy is scheduled to the date of the holiday, and will enable the Alert policy only for that day. Screenshots provided below as well to reference on how this can be configured on the team-level.

Alert Policy:

Maintenance Policy:

Here's an alert example of both these policies working together:

Hope this helps! Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns, etc. around this workaround. 

-Nick

[Florian Beer]

Hi,

this seems to work but it would be really nice to be able to import country specific holiday calendars. In this current setup I have to fill in maintenance windows that activate the policy for each year.

Thanks,
Florian

[Michael Grivas]

Hi @Nick H ,

In order to simplify the overrides, it would be good if a holidays calendar could be added to mark the days in the rotaion or "who's on call"  view.

I wonder if it would be better to add support to confluence calendars.

That way, we could add holidays, or even vacation and other events, and see them in the rotation board, making it easier to arrange the overrides.

[David Whitney]

I would support adding a custom "Holiday" calendars as an OVERRIDE schedule  In certain sectors, like Higher ED, there are a bevy of days off that are atypical for other industries (eg Spring Break), that need special coverage.

[Stephan Schwiderski]

It works fine, but is there a possibilty to re-use the maintenance policy for different teams? It doesn't make sense, to enter all the bank-holiday overrides for every team seperately.

[Michael Grivas]

@Stephan Schwiderski,  what works fine?  Do you have some way to add bank-holidays, even per team ?

[Stephan Schwiderski]

No, I did it like the description at the top; manually without a calender.