Follow the Sun, done right

Your team is spread across the globe, so at almost any hour someone is at their desk. When an alert fires at 3 AM for the engineer on the rota, AlertKick asks the shift that is actually awake to take it first - in Slack, with an Acknowledge button - and only wakes the rota engineer if nobody picks it up. The rotation itself stays a plain, boring rota.

roster global_primary · follow the sun · 3 shifts EMEA on shift now

Hatched stretches are gap hours - nobody on shift. You decide whether those page immediately or nudge with a shorter wait.

Follow-the-sun on-call: nudge the awake shift, then page ONE ROTA · THREE SHIFTS · 24H (UTC) APAC EMEA AMER 00:00 06:00 14:00 22:00 24:00 alert · 10:00 UTC EMEA at their desks Kai · on the rota · 03:00 local, asleep Alert fires checkout-db · disk 92% Rota says: page Kai Working-shift check Kai's shift: 14:00-22:00 UTC It is 03:00 where Kai sleeps #ops-emea · Slack Night-shift alert - can you take this? Kai will be paged in 5 min unless someone acknowledges. Acknowledge someone clicks ack timer runs out Acknowledged in Slack Page cancelled everywhere. Kai sleeps on. No ack in 5 min Kai is paged, exactly as the policy says. The rotation never changes. The platform just checks who is actually awake before waking anyone.

The 3 AM page nobody needed

A disk fills up at 10:00 UTC. The rota says Kai is on call - but Kai is in Sydney, where it is 3 AM. Meanwhile the EMEA half of the team is sitting in Slack, coffee in hand, perfectly capable of restarting that consumer. Every on-call tool still wakes Kai, because the schedule is the only thing it knows. The awake teammates find out the next morning, along with an apology channel full of "sorry, I could have grabbed that".

A schedule type, not a workaround

On-call platforms have always answered follow the sun with homework: one schedule per region, stacked in layers, glued together with time-of-day routing rules that you maintain forever and that quietly break when the clocks change. AlertKick makes follow the sun a schedule type you pick when you create the roster. The rotation stays exactly what it was - daily or weekly, with overrides, swaps, and calendar feeds - and you add your shifts to it: EMEA works 08:00 to 16:00 London time, APAC works 22:00 to 06:00 Sydney time, each shift with its own members and its own Slack channel. Your existing rosters are untouched.

How an alert decides who to disturb

When an escalation level targets a follow-the-sun roster, the algorithm checks one thing before paging: is the rota engineer inside their working shift right now? If yes, they are paged normally and nothing is different. If it is their night, the alert is posted to the awake shift's Slack channel with an Acknowledge button and a plain statement of the stakes: this person will be paged in 5 minutes unless someone takes it. One click acknowledges the alert everywhere and the page never fires. No click, and the rota engineer is woken exactly as the escalation policy says - the nudge adds one bounded wait, never an unbounded silence.

Gap hours and critical alerts stay under your control

Weekends and coverage gaps are explicit, not accidents. If an alert fires when no shift is on the clock, you choose the behavior per roster: page immediately, or nudge the roster's default channel with a shorter wait and a message that says plainly that nobody is in working hours. There is also a per-roster switch to let critical-severity alerts bypass the nudge entirely - some pages should never wait five minutes, and that is your call, not ours.

You can see it, so you can trust it

The schedule timeline shows each shift's working window as a tinted band behind the rotation bars, so "Kai's bar outside Kai's band" is visible at a glance before any alert ever fires. A 24-hour coverage strip shows the handovers and the gaps in your own local time. And every nudge is recorded on the alert's activity timeline - who was asleep, which channel was nudged, how long the wait was, and whether the page fired or was acknowledged away.

See how rosters, rotations, and overrides work

Common questions

Does follow the sun change who is on call?
No. The rotation is the same simple daily or weekly rota you already run, with the same overrides, swaps, and calendar feeds. Follow the sun only changes how an alert reaches people: if the rota engineer is outside their working shift, the awake shift gets a Slack nudge first, and the rota engineer is paged only if nobody acknowledges within the wait window.
What happens if nobody acknowledges the Slack nudge?
The rota engineer is paged after the configured wait (5 minutes by default), exactly as the escalation policy says. The nudge is a chance to avoid the wake-up, never a replacement for it. Acknowledging anywhere - Slack, mobile app, web - cancels the page everywhere.
What if the alert fires when no shift is in working hours?
You choose. Either the rota engineer is paged immediately with no delay, or the roster's default Slack channel still gets a nudge with a shorter wait and a distinct message saying no shift is on the clock. Critical alerts can also be set to bypass the nudge entirely and page straight away.
Do I need a separate roster per region?
No, and that is the point. One roster, one rotation, one escalation policy. You define the shifts - each with its own timezone, working hours, days, members, and Slack channel - inside the roster, and the alerting algorithm consults them at page time. No layered schedules, no time-of-day routing rules to keep in sync.

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