What it is
On-Call in TATER Ops answers one question well: who is on call right now? A rotation is an ordered list of members plus a rotation length and a start date. That is the whole model.
There is no shift table. TATER does not write a row per week per person, so there is nothing to run out, nothing to regenerate at the end of a quarter, and nothing to fall out of step if somebody edits a date.
How "who is on call now" is worked out
The answer is computed on every read from four things:
- the rotation's start date - the anchor the cycle is measured from;
- the rotation length - how long one person holds the pager;
- the ordered member list; and
- the current time.
Elapsed time since the anchor, divided by the rotation length, modulo the number of members, gives the position in the list. That is the person on call.
Two useful consequences follow, and they are the reason the model is shaped this way:
- It is self-correcting. A rotation left alone for a year is still right, because nothing was pre-generated to become stale.
- It is deterministic. Two people asking at the same moment get the same answer, and so does the AI Analyst.
What happens when you change the list
Because position is derived from the member list, editing that list re-derives the current holder. Adding a person, removing one, or reordering the list can change who is on call immediately - not at the next handoff.
That is worth knowing before you edit a live rotation during an incident. If you need to hand the pager to somebody now, that is what the change does; if you meant to alter next month's order, make the change and then check who the page says is on call before you walk away.
Reading the schedule
The On-Call page lists your rotations. Each one is enriched on read with:
- currentOnCall - who holds it now; and
- nextHandoffAt - when it passes to the next person.
There is also a flat "who is on call right now" view across all active rotations, which is the one to use when you have separate rotations for, say, infrastructure and applications and you just need a name.
Who can do what
- Auditor and above can read rotations and the current-on-call view.
- Admin and above can create, edit and delete rotations.
Reading is deliberately open to Auditor: knowing who to escalate to is not privileged information, and a rota nobody can see gets replaced by a spreadsheet.
Through the AI Analyst
list_oncall- the rotations, each with its current holder and next handoffget_oncall_current- the flat "who is on call right now" answerupsert_oncall_rotation- create or amend a rotation (Admin)
"Who is on call?" is a good question to ask the Analyst during an incident, because it resolves the same way the page does rather than from anyone's memory of the rota.
Related
- Major Incidents - where an escalation usually starts
- Staff Roster - the people a rotation draws from
- TATER Ops overview - where this page sits in the console