Usage example

Let’s create a rotation using dienstplan. Just pass in a create command followed by a rotation name, a list of the channel users in a rotation, and a rotation description:

@dienstplan create my-rota @user1 @user2 @user3
On-call engineer's duties:
- Process support team questions queue
- Resolve service alerts
- Check service health metrics
- Casual code refactoring-
 Follow the boy scout rule: always leave the campground cleaner than you found it

Once the rota is set up, the first user in the list becomes a current on-call person. Check it with a who command:

@dienstplan who my-rota

To change the current on-call person to the next one use rotate command:

@dienstplan rotate my-rota

The bot iterates over the users in the list order:

@user1 -> @user2 ->  @user3 -> @user1 ...

Now that you know the basics, let’s automate rotation and current duty notifications with Slack’s built-in /remind command. First, set up a reminder to rotate users weekly:

/remind #my-channel to "@dienstplan rotate my-rota" every Monday at 9AM UTC

Second, remind duties to a current on-call person:

/remind #my-channel to "@dienstplan who my-rota" every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday at 10AM UTC

Get help with:

@dienstplan help

Up & Running

Grab dienstplan from the GitHub repository along with user documentation, installation guide and deployment scripts.