Managing complex on-call rotations, such as follow-the-sun schedules or multi-team escalations, can become complicated. Instead of adding multiple on-call schedules to every escalation policy, you can simplify management by creating smaller reusable policies.

Such a policy groups all your on-call schedules together. You can then reference this single container policy within your other escalation policies, making them cleaner and easier to manage.

Create follow-the-sun schedules

First, create three schedules for EU, US West, and Asia/Pacific time zones to ensure 24/7 global coverage.

In Uptime -> Who's on-call -> Create on-call schedule:

• Create Schedule for EU: covering Europe working hours.
  
• Create Schedule for US West: covering the West Coast working hours.
  
• Create Schedule for APAC: covering Asia/Pacific working hours.
  

Setting up schedule active hours

Select Schedule active: Specific days and times and configure when the schedule should be active. No one in the schedule will be alerted outside its active hours.

You'll see the alternating schedules and shifts on Who's on-call page, with one person always on call 24/7:

Create a reusable policy for all on-call schedules

Create a dedicated escalation policy that will serve as a single point of reference for all your on-call personnel.

1. Go to Uptime -> Escalation policies -> Create escalation policy.
2. Name it something descriptive, like Follow-the-sun on-call.
3. In the first escalation step, under Who should we alert?, add all three on-call schedules. Better Stack automatically notifies whoever's on-call in their local region.
4. Remove any other steps from this policy. It should only have one step that notifies all your schedules.
5. Click Create escalation policy.

This escalation setup provides continuous coverage without night shifts, allowing each region to handle incidents during its normal working hours.

Reference this policy in your other policies

Now, you can use your new Follow-the-sun on-call policy as a building block in other escalation policies. This allows you to create multi-layered escalation flows without duplicating the list of on-call schedules everywhere.

Create a new policy describing the final escalation flow.

1. Create another escalation policy and name it High priority escalation.

2. In the first step, under Who should we alert?, select your Follow-the-sun on-call policy from the dropdown menu. Feel free to add other targets, e.g. your integrations.

   

3. Add more steps as needed. For example, you can re-alert the Follow-the-sun on-call policy after 15 minutes, and then escalate to the entire team if the incident is still not acknowledged.

4. Click Create escalation policy.

How it works

When an incident uses the High priority escalation policy:

1. It triggers the Follow-the-sun on-call policy, alerting everyone currently on-call across all schedules.
2. The escalation flow immediately continues the High priority escalation policy.
3. After 15 minutes, the Follow-the-sun on-call policy would be triggered again, and after 15 more minutes the entire team would get escalated.

This approach allows you to build complex, multi-level escalations while keeping your on-call schedule management simple and centralized. If you need to add or remove an on-call schedule, you only have to update the Follow-the-sun on-call policy, and the change will automatically apply to all policies that use it.

Triggering multiple escalation policies in a single escalation step?

They will get started in parallel, and the main esclation policy would immediatelly continue. If you want to wait for the referenced policies to finish, add a waiting period to your next step.

Need help?

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