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Core Features

On-Call Scheduling

Run on-call rotations, route monitoring alerts to whoever is up, escalate unanswered alerts, and track standby hours for payroll.

Last updated: October 13, 2026

On-Call Scheduling runs rotations, takes alerts from your monitoring tools, and pages whoever is on call, skipping anyone on approved leave or already at their overtime limit. It also tracks on-call hours for payroll.

What you need

  • The On-Call Scheduling add-on. It is a paid add-on on every plan.
  • An admin or owner to buy it and set it up.

Add the add-on

1

Open Billing

Go to Settings › Billing and find On-Call Scheduling under Add-ons & Options.

2

Add it

Click Add. You need an active subscription with a payment method; without one the card says Requires an active subscription. The charge is prorated on your next invoice.

Once it is active, these appear:

  • Scheduling › On-Call Scheduling for admins: schedules, the coverage grid, alerts, sources, rules and hours.
  • Scheduling › On-Call Alerts: the alert feed, for admins and for people with the Ops role.
  • Team On-Call in a manager's user menu: who is on call now, with overrides.
  • An On-Call Schedule card on each participant's dashboard, with swap requests.

Create a schedule

1

Start a new schedule

Go to Scheduling › On-Call Scheduling and click New schedule.

2

Set the rotation

Fill in:

  • Name (for example "Primary on-call") and an optional Description.
  • Rotation: Daily or Weekly.
  • Handoff time, and for a weekly rotation the Handoff day.
  • Timezone: the clock the handoff time is read on, for example America/New_York.
  • Rotation starts: the date the rotation begins.
3

Set escalation (optional)

In Escalate if unacked after (minutes, optional), enter how long an alert may stay unacknowledged before TimeLeaf escalates it. Leave it blank to switch escalation off. In Escalation target, choose who gets the escalation, or leave No designee — use direct manager.

4

Add participants

Under Participants, move people from Available to Rotation order. The order is the order they take turns. Remove someone with the remove button.

5

Save

Click Save schedule. The rotation hands off automatically from then on. To change it later, click the edit icon on the schedule's row; the delete icon removes it.

Change who is on call

Coverage grid (admins)

Below the schedules, the Coverage grid shows one week of a schedule, one row per participant plus an Unassigned row for gaps. Pick the schedule at the top, and move between weeks with the arrows or Today.

To hand a day to someone else, drag that day's block onto their row. With the keyboard, focus the block, press Enter, and choose the person in Reassign … to. Choose Unassigned to clear a change you made. Changed days are marked as an override.

Team On-Call (managers)

Managers open Team On-Call from the user menu to see who is on call now for each schedule and the active overrides. Set override puts someone on call for a date range: choose the Coverer, the Start date and End date, and an optional Reason. Admins and owners can choose anyone; a manager can cover the window themselves or give it to one of their own reports.

Swaps (employees)

Participants see their upcoming windows in the On-Call Schedule card on their dashboard. Request cover asks a teammate on the same schedule to take a window. The teammate can Accept or Decline, and an accepted swap becomes an override automatically. Either side can Revert swap before the window starts.

Each person chooses whether to get handoff reminders ("You're now on call" and "off call in 1h") under Settings › Notifications with the On-Call Handoff preference.

Connect your monitoring tools

Go to Scheduling › On-Call Scheduling › Sources.

Webhook sources

1

Create a source

On the Webhook sources tab, pick the schedule the source should page and click New source. Give it a Name (for example the tool's name) and click Create source.

2

Copy the URL and secret

TimeLeaf shows the Webhook URL and the Signing secret. Copy both into your monitoring tool. The secret is shown only once; click I've saved the secret when you have it.

Email intake

On the Email intake tab, click Set up email intake to create the one inbound address your workspace gets, and choose the Schedule it pages. Then add each address that may send alerts under Allowed senders and click Save allowlist. Mail is checked with SPF and DKIM. With no allowed senders, every email is rejected.

Rules

Go to Rules, pick a schedule and click New rule to decide what an incoming payload does. Rules are checked from top to bottom and the first match wins. Reorder them with Move up and Move down.

Each rule has:

  • Conditions: a field from the payload, written like _payload.state, compared with equals, contains or regex. All conditions must match; a rule with none always matches.
  • Action: create an alert, or close an existing one (so your tool's own recovery message clears the page).
  • Alias template: the key used to spot repeats and to close the right alert, for example orion-{{_payload.entity}}. A repeat of an open alert does not page again.
  • Title template, and optional Message template and Priority template.

Alerts

Scheduling › On-Call Alerts lists every alert for a schedule, manual or automatic. Filter by status (all, open, acknowledged, resolved). Acknowledge an open alert to stop it escalating, and Resolve it once it is handled. Raise alert opens one by hand with a Title, an optional Message and an optional Priority.

The Ops role

The Ops role lets someone view, acknowledge and resolve on-call alerts without admin or manager access. Tick Ops role when you add or edit the employee, or choose Make Ops in the employee's row Actions menu on People › Employees & Teams. People with the Ops role can open On-Call Alerts but not the schedules, sources or rules.

Who gets paged

A new alert goes to the person on call by SMS, email and an in-app notification.

TimeLeaf starts from the rotation's pick and skips anyone on approved leave or already at their daily or weekly overtime limit, moving to the next person. An override is never skipped this way. If nobody in the rotation is available, TimeLeaf pages the original pick anyway, because paging someone is better than paging nobody.

Escalation

When a schedule has an escalation time and an alert is still unacknowledged after it, TimeLeaf pages again: first the schedule's escalation target, otherwise the paged person's manager, and if neither is available, the person on call again. It keeps escalating at that interval until someone acknowledges or resolves the alert, up to a fixed number of times, after which the alert stays open for someone to handle.

Voice escalation

At the top of Scheduling › On-Call Scheduling, the Voice escalation box has Call the on-call person when an alert fires. It is off by default. When on, an alert also places a phone call to the on-call person's personal number with a press-1-to-acknowledge prompt. Calls count toward your on-call notification usage. If the box says Voice calling isn't set up for this workspace, voice calling is not available yet and the switch can't be turned on.

Hours and payroll

Scheduling › On-Call Scheduling › Hours reports on-call time per employee over a date range, with Download CSV:

  • Active hours: approved worked time marked as on-call work, and the payable part of it.
  • Standby coverage: time carrying the pager, taken straight from the rotation, and the payable part of it.

Whether standby is paid, its multiplier, and a premium for active work are set in the overtime policy's On-call standby pay section. See Overtime & Time Bank. The report shows Not configured when the person has no overtime policy that sets these.