Teams are where all the magic happens in Squid Alerts.
There are two roles within a team: managers and members.
Managers are responsible for pretty much configuring everything as it relates to team. They can setup the on-call calendar, escalation chains, and routing rules. They can change the team name (and therefor the alerting email address) and who is in each role. Team managers can also configure inbound phone numbers, live call routing options, and SMS forwarding. There's more, but you get the idea...
Members can be added to the on-call calendar, included directly in the escalation chain, and can be assigned incidents that are associated with the team.
Outside of these two roles exist two other non-team roles: company admins and non-admins.
Company admins can perform the same functions as a team manager across all teams.
Non-admins within the company that are not part of the team can still see alerts and incidents associated with the team as well as the team's on-call calendar and escalation chain.
A team's on-call calendar allows you to specify for specific time, days, or weeks who should be the primary and backup points of contact for a team.
On-call schedules work directly with the escalation chain so that you can decide who gets notified when and how.
The primary and secondary on-call are also used by our live call routing feature. When a call comes into a team's inbound phone number, the caller is given an option to be forwarded to either the primary on-call, secondary on-call, or the team manager.
Additionally, the primary on-call resource can be contacted if SMS forwarded is enabled for inbound phone numbers.
If live call routing and SMS routing our enabled, the primary on-call essentially has a virtual cell phone that automatically gets handed off as the on-call calendar is updated.
The times seen on the on-call calendar are the start time of the schedule based on your personally configured time zone setting.
Outside of live call routing and SMS forwarding, there's no functional difference between a primary on-call and secondary on-call schedule. However, by convention, the primary on-call is who you want to receive a notification first when a new incident is associated with the team.
In an ideal world, this means that secondary on-call will get to sleep soundly, but we know stuff happens. That's why there's a secondary or backup on-call.
You are NOT limited to having a single person as the primary or secondary on-call. You can have multiple of either during any given time period. For example, a single primary on-call and two secondary on-call team members.
From a team's on-call calendar, a team manager will have the option to setup additional on-call schedules. The following information is required:
If you want to skip a certain number of days between each on-call schedule, then choose the daily recurring schedule. Your on-call can be more than one day and still choose daily.
Examples:
End after will duplicate the schedule X number of times. Where as end by will stop scheduling once a certain date is reached.
This is common for teams that rotate on-call on a specific day of week, for example, Fridays at 9:00 AM.
End after will duplicate the schedule X number of times. Where as end by will stop scheduling once a certain date is reached.
On call-schedules can be modified in one of two ways. Primarily, you'll click the on-call schedule on the calendar and the details of the schedule will appear. From there, you can update the resource, type, and time. You can also delete the on-call schedule from this panel.
When editing a recurring on-call, it will only affect that instance of the schedule. If you want to update all schedules in the series, you must delete the series and recreate it.
On-call schedules can also be drag-and-dropped from on day to another. This will not change the time, resource, or type. Only the days it is scheduled.
Squid Alerts can actually make your on-call schedule for you. That way you can blame us whenever someone has to work New Year's Day.
From the team's on-call calendar, team managers can click the Auto Schedule button. Once enabled the following options become visible:
Once you hit save the new on-call schedules will be generate and the calendar will be updated. The on-call schedule is also update each night and will schedule 2 primary rotations per team member. For example, if you have 3 team members and setup weekly rotation, you next 6 weeks will be populated.
If an empty day is coming up in your on-call schedule, the team managers can receive a remind via email that their schedule needs to be updated. This is from the team's general settings page.