On-call schedules and escalation

Schedule time zones

Every schedule owns an IANA time zone and a local rotation start. A 09:00 handoff remains 09:00 in that schedule through daylight-saving changes.

Organization and personal time zones affect defaults and display. They do not silently change an existing schedule.

Only organization members with Responder on-call access can be added to a rotation, override, or shift trade. Collaborators retain product access but are not eligible for alert routing.

Coverage patterns

A coverage pattern says how many covered days each responder owns before the rotation advances. Participants are evaluated in the displayed order, and the pattern repeats for as long as the schedule runs.

The schedule editor provides these presets:

Pattern	Stored as	Example with Avery, Blair, and Casey
Weekly	7	Avery covers seven days, Blair the next seven, then Casey.
Daily	1	Avery covers Monday, Blair Tuesday, Casey Wednesday, then Avery Thursday.
Weekday / weekend	5 / 2	Avery covers Monday–Friday, Blair covers Saturday–Sunday, and Casey gets the next Monday–Friday block.
Four / three	4 / 3	Avery covers Monday–Thursday, Blair covers Friday–Sunday, Casey gets the next four-day block, and the cycle continues.
Custom	Your sequence	2 / 2 / 3 assigns two days to Avery, two to Blair, three to Casey, then repeats with the next participant.

The numbers describe consecutive coverage days, not a repeating assignment to one named person. After every segment, Firewatch advances to the next active participant. For example, 4 / 3 with three responders produces:

1. Avery for four coverage days;
2. Blair for three coverage days;
3. Casey for four coverage days;
4. Avery for three coverage days; and
5. Blair for the next four coverage days.

Use Weekly for a conventional weekly handoff, Daily when ownership changes every day, and Weekday / weekend when weekday and weekend blocks should go to different people. Use Custom only when the handoff cadence cannot be expressed by a preset.

Each segment must be between 1 and 28 coverage days. A pattern can contain up to 14 segments and a schedule can contain up to 100 unique participants.

Weekday exclusions and gaps

Choose the weekdays on which the rotation provides coverage. Excluded weekdays:

• have no rotation responder;
• do not advance the alternating pattern; and
• appear as gaps in the calendar.

The rotation start must fall on an included weekday. An exact schedule override can cover a normally excluded day.

Use this for schedules that deliberately operate only on certain weekdays. Do not exclude weekends from a 24×7 production schedule: an excluded day is intentionally uncovered, not silently assigned to Friday’s responder.

Scheduled participant changes

Each participant can have an optional joins at and leaves at instant. Firewatch recalculates the active participant list at those instants, allowing a future addition or removal without a precisely timed manual edit.

Review the future calendar after changing participant dates. Removing someone from the active roster changes subsequent rotation positions.

Overrides

An override assigns one organization member for an exact start and end time and supersedes the normal rotation. Overrides on the same schedule cannot overlap.

Use overrides for leave, temporary cover, or one-off gaps. They are different from changing the rotation because they do not rewrite future cadence.

Shift coverage and trades

Any member can request:

• coverage, where another member takes the requester’s shift; or
• a trade, where each member takes one of the other’s non-overlapping shifts.

The requester must own the entire offered rotation window. For a trade, the target must own the entire return window. Only the target can accept or decline, and only the requester can cancel while the request is pending.

Acceptance writes the corresponding schedule overrides atomically. Outstanding requests appear as a count next to Shift trades.

Month and week calendars

The Calendar page has directly linkable month and week views. Select a shift to inspect its schedule, responder, time range, source, and related services.

Holiday calendars add organization closures and early-close annotations to the calendar. They are informational overlays today: they do not remove or replace on-call coverage automatically. Use weekday exclusions or overrides when the rotation itself should change.

Built-in holiday calendars cannot be edited. Custom calendars can contain full closures or early-close events in their own time zone.

Escalation policies

A policy contains up to ten ordered steps:

• the first step is immediate;
• every later delay is relative to the preceding step; and
• a step can target a schedule, primary service owners, or all service owners.

When an incident is created, Firewatch writes every delayed step to its durable outbox. A schedule target is resolved when that step becomes due, so current overrides and effective participant changes are honored.

Acknowledging or resolving the incident prevents remaining steps from sending. The skipped work remains visible in the incident lifecycle instead of being silently deleted.

At each due step, Firewatch attempts all enabled delivery channels available for each targeted responder. It does not send email, then Slack, then phone as three separate policy steps unless you model separate responder targets yourself.