On-Call Scheduling: Which Role Do I Need?

[Raguram1]

On-call scheduling touches sensitive information: who to call at 2am, personal phone numbers, and which team owns which outage. Roles exist so access matches responsibility—the person who sets up rotations for the whole company isn't the same person who's just checking who's covering tonight. Get this right, and three things happen: no one accidentally edits another team's schedule, on-call contact details stay visible only to the people who need them, and every team has one clear owner for its own rotation, no matter how large your organization grows.

Understand the three levels of access

Every on-call role falls into one of three buckets. Knowing your bucket tells you what you can do before you ever need to look up a role's technical name.

Whole-org access — a small number of people who set up and maintain on-call scheduling for the entire company, across every team.

Team-only access — the most common case. You can fully manage your own team's rotation, with no reach into any other team's schedule.

Look-only access — full visibility into who's on call, escalation history, and schedules, with no ability to change anything.

Most people only need to know which bucket they're in. The table below goes further for anyone assigning roles.

Find your role

Match what you want to do to the role you need.

I want to...	I need	Role name
Set up on-call scheduling for the company for the first time, or connect it to phone, SMS, or paging providers	the account-wide setup role	sn_on_call_admin
Create and maintain schedules and rotations for multiple teams	On-Call Administrator	rota_admin
Manage the rotation for just my own team	Shift Manager	rota_manager
See who's on call and check escalation history, without making changes	Read-only access	oc_read
Track on-call performance and trends across teams	the cross-team analytics role	rota_prem_dashboard_user

The role name is what you'll select when assigning security roles to a user in User Administration.

Good to know: the account-wide setup role also includes the cross-team analytics view by default—so anyone given that role automatically sees performance data across every team, not just their own.

A legacy role you may still see

Some organizations have a legacy administrator role still assigned from an earlier setup. It continues to work, but isn't recommended for new users—assign On-Call Administrator instead.

Becoming a Shift Manager

This is the question we hear most often. There are three supported ways to become a Shift Manager for a team:

You already manage the team. Nothing to configure—this happens automatically.

Delegated by an admin. An admin can delegate the Shift Manager role to you directly, usually for temporary or rotating coverage.

Added in Group Preferences. An admin adds you to your group's Group Preferences as a shift manager—a good fit when you're a permanent Shift Manager but not the team's org-chart manager.

All three work the same once set—there's no difference in what you can do based on which path was used.

A few things to keep in mind

If the three supported paths above don't fit your situation, don't build a custom workaround to assign Shift Managers. Custom workarounds here can silently stop working after an upgrade, without any warning. Use Group Preferences or delegation instead.

If you're moving from older workflow-based escalation to newer flow-based escalation steps, remember that the setting controlling how phone calls are placed and the trigger rule's own action setting are two separate switches. Update both—updating one doesn't update the other.