Documentation Grafana Cloud Alerts and IRM IRM Manage On-call schedules Create schedules

Create on-call schedules

Create on-call schedules in Grafana IRM to establish automated rotation management. With on-call schedules, you can:

• Ensure consistent coverage for alerts and incidents
• Distribute on-call responsibilities across your team
• Define custom rotation patterns that match your team’s needs
• Manage schedule changes and temporary coverage adjustments
• Monitor and improve schedule quality

Schedules work together with escalation chains and notification rules to automatically route alerts and notify the right team members at the right time.

Before you begin

Ensure you have the proper permissions and setup before creating a schedule:

• Admin or Editor permissions are required to create, edit, and delete schedules
• Add necessary team members to Grafana IRM
• Viewer role users cannot be assigned to on-call shifts or receive alert notifications

For more details on role permissions, refer to Manage users and teams.

Create a schedule

1. In your Grafana Cloud stack, navigate to Alerts and IRM → IRM → Schedules
2. Click + New Schedule
3. Click + Create to start setting up your on-call rotation

Configure basic settings

1. Schedule name: Enter a descriptive name that clearly identifies the schedule’s purpose (for example, “Database Team Primary” or “APAC Support”)

2. Assign to team: Select the team responsible for this schedule. Teams are managed in Grafana Teams Management.

3. Notification settings: Define how your team members are notified about this schedule. You can configure:

   • Slack channel: Where schedule notifications and errors will be posted
   • Slack user group: Automatically updates with current on-call members
   • Shift notifications: Set when notifications are sent for shift changes

Add rotations

Rotations determine when team members are on-call. To configure rotations:

1. Click + Add Rotation
2. Configure the following settings:
   • Start date and time: Set when the rotation begins
   • Recurrence period: Define how often the shift rotates to the next team member (daily, weekly, etc.)
   • Mask by weekdays: Select which days the rotation is active (for example, weekdays only, weekends only, or specific days)
   • Shift length: Specify the duration of each on-call shift (for example, 8 hours, 12 hours, 1 day)
3. Add users to assign team members to the rotation
4. Click Create to save the rotation

Add multiple layers (optional)

For more complex on-call coverage, you can add multiple layers to your schedule:

1. Click + Add Layer
2. Configure each layer with different rotations (for example, a primary layer and a backup layer)
3. Assign different team members to each layer based on their roles and expertise
4. Set the order of layers to determine escalation priority

Review and validate

Before finalizing your schedule:

1. Review the calendar view to ensure coverage looks correct
2. Check for any gaps in coverage or scheduling conflicts
3. Verify rotation patterns work as expected
4. Test how the schedule appears in different time zones

Next steps

Now that your on-call schedule is set up, take these steps to ensure alerts are automatically routed and escalated:

• Set up escalation chains to define how alerts escalate when not acknowledged
• Configure notification rules to customize how and when team members receive alert notifications
• Manage shift swaps and overrides to allow team members to swap shifts or set temporary overrides