How to Set Up On-Call Rotations
On-call rotations ensure there is always someone available to respond to incidents. Nova makes it easy to create fair schedules, set up escalation policies, and track coverage gaps.
Steps
Create a team
Go to On-Call > Teams and click Create Team. Add team members by email or username. Each member needs a Nova account.
Create a rotation schedule
Click New Schedule and configure the rotation type:
- Daily — hand off every 24 hours
- Weekly — hand off every 7 days
- Custom — define your own rotation length
Set the handoff time (e.g., 09:00 UTC) and the starting participant.
Set up escalation policies
Define what happens if the primary on-call does not acknowledge within a set time:
- Wait 5 minutes, then escalate to secondary on-call
- Wait 10 minutes, then escalate to team lead
- Wait 15 minutes, then page the entire team
Configure notification preferences
Each team member can set their preferred notification method (push notification, SMS, phone call, Slack DM) under their profile settings.
Enable Coverage Gaps Detection to get alerts when a time window has no on-call engineer assigned. This prevents incidents from going unacknowledged.
Add overrides for time off
When someone is on vacation, create an override by clicking Add Override on the schedule calendar. Select the replacement engineer and the date range.
Link services to the schedule
Go to Services and assign the on-call schedule to each service. When an alert fires for that service, it will automatically page the current on-call engineer.
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