Core Concepts

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Schedules

The schedule is the most basic concept in Shiftkeeper. It determines who should be on-call for a given time period. At its core, a schedule consists of a group of users and rotation settings. The rotation settings determine how often and when the schedule shifts are rotated among the users in the rotation.

Schedules are typically used to rotate roles or responsibilities among a group of users. For example, you might use a schedule to rotate incident response responsibilities or support hero duties.

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Shifts

A shift represents an interval of time during which a user is on-call for a given schedule.

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Overrides

Overrides enable you to make one-off changes to a schedule, without disrupting your rotation settings. This is useful when schedule members are unavailable for a shift they are assigned to, e.g., due to vacation, sick leave, etc.

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Coverage requests

Coverage requests enable you to ask for coverage from your teammates without the back-and-forth. You choose the time interval you need coverage for and Shiftkeeper takes care of notifying the right people.

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Teams

A team is a collection of users. Teams enable you to group and filter schedules. They are also used to determine which users a coverage request should be sent to.

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Using Shiftkeeper

You interact with Shiftkeeper in multiple ways: in Slack, in the web app and via the API. The guides in the documentation cover both Slack and the web app. The API reference describes the API endpoints and how to use them.