On-call scheduling that always knows who to page

How does an on-call rotation work in Oncallz?

Each schedule belongs to a team and has its own timezone, a rotation rule and an ordered list of participants. The rule sets a start date, a handoff time and an interval. Oncallz walks forward from the start date and assigns one participant per shift, following the order of the list.

Generation is deterministic: the same rule and the same people always produce the same shifts, and regenerating never creates duplicates. When you add, remove or reorder people, only future shifts are rebuilt. The person on call right now keeps their shift.

• Daily — hands off every day at the handoff time.
• Weekly — hands off every seven days, the classic one-week rotation.
• Custom — hands off every N days, for example every three days or every two weeks.
• Daily with multiple shifts — splits each day at the start times you choose, so 09:00 / 18:00 / 02:00 gives 9, 8 and 7 hour shifts for day/night or follow-the-sun cover.

How do overrides and shift swaps work?

An override puts someone else on call for a fixed window without editing the rotation. There are two kinds. A manual override, created by a team lead, scheduler or admin, takes effect immediately.

A coverage request, created by the person on call, stays pending until the replacement accepts or declines.

Only approved overrides change who gets paged. The underlying shift is never rewritten, so the rotation resumes by itself when the window ends.

Overrides can be dragged and resized on the schedule timeline, cancelled before or during the window, and posted to Slack, Microsoft Teams or an outbound webhook if you connect one.

Who can see and manage schedules?

Team roles decide what people can do. Leads and schedulers manage schedules, participants and overrides for their team. Responders see schedules and assignments read-only.

Organization owners and admins can manage every team, and they choose whether regular members see who is on call across all teams or only in their own.

What happens if nobody is on call?

A gap in coverage is the failure that hurts most, so Oncallz guards against it in three places.

• Shifts are generated 90 days ahead, and a nightly job extends that horizon so a rotation never quietly runs out.
• A daily check alerts team leads when an active schedule with participants has nobody on call.
• If an incident arrives during a gap, the team leads are paged instead, so no incident is raised to nobody.

How do people know when they are on call?

Oncallz sends notices around every shift, so handoffs do not depend on anyone’s memory.

• A reminder the day before a shift starts.
• A notice when the shift starts and another when it ends.
• A weekly digest of upcoming shifts every Monday morning.
• A notification when someone asks you to cover, and when your own request is accepted or declined.

Can AI check a team’s schedule for problems?

Yes, if you have added your own AI provider key. From the team page, a lead can run a scheduling analysis.

Oncallz builds a snapshot of the last 30 days and the next 14 — hours on call per person including the weekend and after-hours share, coverage gaps, override churn, paging load and the escalation setup.

It asks the model to point out gaps, single points of failure, overloaded people and broken escalation. The analysis is advisory and never changes the schedule.