Teams, schedules and escalation

Teams, schedules, escalation policies and routing rules decide who is paged for an alert. You describe them to your assistant in plain words. It turns them into one change for you to review.

The parts

• Team. A group of people who own some services. A person must already be in Noci AI to join a team.
• Schedule. Who is on call, and when. A team has a primary schedule and can have a secondary one. Noci builds a team’s schedules from its rotation.
• Rotation policy. The shape of a rotation: the shifts in a day, how long one person’s turn lasts (a shift, a day or a week), and when the turn passes to the next person. It names nobody.
• Rotation assignment. Puts a team on a rotation policy, with the people for each role in turn order. The primary and the secondary each have their own list.
• Layer. One rotation inside a schedule. You do not write layers yourself: Noci makes them from the rotation policy and the people.
• Cover. One person taking another person’s shift for a set time, such as a holiday.
• Escalation policy. What happens when an alert needs a person. Each step names who to page and how long to wait before the next step. The policy can run again if nobody answers.
• Routing rule. Sends alerts to a team. A rule matches on the alert’s name or its tags. The first rule that matches wins.

What your assistant does

For a team that is new to Noci, your assistant describes the whole thing at once: the team, who is in it, its rotation, its escalation policy and its routing rule. It sets up who is on call with a rotation policy and a rotation assignment, not with a schedule written by hand. Things made in the same change can point at each other, so you do not have to set them up in separate rounds.

1. Preview. config_plan shows what the change would do, line by line, and who would be on call before and after. Nothing is saved and nobody is asked.
2. Ask. config_propose files the change. It waits for a person to confirm it in Noci.

For a single cover, a single routing rule or a single new team member, your assistant uses the narrower tools. request_cover asks for a cover. route_alerts asks for a routing rule, and shows what the last 30 days of alerts would have done.

Review once

A change that sets up several things at once is a big change, so Noci treats it with care.

• You confirm it in the Noci console, not in the chat.
• It shows every line, grouped, with the preview of who is on call.
• If a team would be left with nobody on call, the review says so.
• It waits 72 hours for your answer.
• You confirm once. You can undo it once: the undo is a new change that undoes everything in it, and you confirm that too.

Your assistant cannot confirm for you. It gives you a link to the change.

If you do not agree

Reject the change in Noci and say why. Your assistant reads your reason and prepares a better one. Your assistant can also take back a change you asked for that is still waiting.

Next: Slack channels.