When to use one
- Vacations and days off.
- One-off swaps between colleagues (“I’ll take your Friday, you take my Saturday”).
- Coverage during an event, a risky deploy or a maintenance window.
- Unplanned absence.
Creating one
1
Open the schedule
Under Schedules, select the team’s schedule.
2
Set the window
Start and end of the override. Outside that window, the normal rotation resumes on its own.
3
Pick who covers
The substitute must be a member of the team.
4
Record the reason
Optional but recommended: “vacation”, “swap with Ana”, “deploy coverage”. It makes auditing on-call far easier later.
Owners, admins and members can create overrides. That is deliberate: the person on call needs to be able to arrange cover without waiting for an admin at 2 a.m.
How an override interacts with everything else
- It takes precedence. During the window, the substitute is the responder, whatever the rotation would say.
- It does not change the rotation. After the window ends, the sequence continues exactly where it was.
- It applies to new incidents. An already-open incident stays with whoever was paged; an override does not reassign existing incidents.