External rotations

An external rotation is a Round Robin rotation whose schedule is owned by an outside on-call provider: PagerDuty, OpsGenie or Jira Service Management. Round Robin periodically reads the provider schedule and keeps the rotation in sync: the member list mirrors the schedule’s participants, and whoever is on shift in the provider becomes the on-duty user in Slack. You keep all the Slack-side features (mentions, channel topics, shift notifications) without managing the same shifts in two places.

You need: a provider connected under Settings → Integrations. See Integrate PagerDuty, Integrate OpsGenie or Integrate Jira Service Management.

Connect a rotation to an external schedule

Before you start, connect your provider in the dashboard under Settings > Integrations. See Integrate PagerDuty, Integrate OpsGenie or Integrate Jira Service Management. Any existing rotation can be bound to an external schedule; there is no separate “external rotation” type to create.

1. In the dashboard, open the rotation and go to its Edit Schedule page.
2. In the schedule type picker, an External section shows a card per provider, but only for the ones you have connected.
3. Pick the provider, then search for and select the schedule you want to bind. A details panel shows the schedule before you commit.
4. Save. The rotation switches to external mode, and the first sync fills in members and the on-duty user.

Switching to external resets the rotation’s options and replaces any existing schedule with the external binding.

Viewing an external rotation

On the rotation’s page in the dashboard:

• The Roster tab lists everyone on the linked provider schedule, with an “N of M linked to Slack” badge, who is on duty, and, for each person, who they are in Slack and where that came from: Matched by email, Set manually, or Not in Slack. Membership itself is read-only, because the provider owns it.
• The schedule card shows a read-only view of the external schedule, with a timeline of upcoming shifts, instead of the internal schedule details.

Say who a participant is in Slack

Matching by email address is a guess, and it fails whenever somebody’s provider address is not the address they use in Slack, or the provider exposes no address at all. Anybody it fails on is called out at the top of the Roster tab: on duty, they would be shown as a shift with nobody to mention.

1. Open the rotation and go to the Roster tab.
2. Find the person, and click Pick person (or Change, if they are already linked).
3. Search the workspace by name or email, and pick them.

Your answer takes effect on the next sync and wins over the email address from then on, including when the schedule changes at the provider. To go back to matching by email, open the same picker and choose Match by email again.

Anybody already matched by email stays matched: setting one person by hand changes nothing for the rest.

Picking a person needs permission to edit the rotation.

How the sync works

On every sync, Round Robin:

1. Reads the linked schedule from the provider.
2. Matches each schedule participant to a Slack user by email address, unless somebody has said who that participant is, in which case that answer is used.
3. Overwrites the rotation’s member list with the matched users, and stores the schedule’s time zone.
4. Sets whoever is currently on shift as on duty, until the end of their shift. If nobody is on shift, the duty is cleared.

The sync runs roughly once a minute, so a change in the provider is picked up shortly after you make it, not instantly.

If the person currently on shift has no Slack account with a matching email and nobody has said who they are, Round Robin tracks them as an unmapped external duty: the shift is still visible on the dashboard, but no Slack user is assigned.

Matching addresses is the easy way, not the only way

The simplest setup is for people to use the same email address in Slack and in your on-call provider, because Round Robin then links the two identities on its own. Where that is not possible, pick the person yourself on the Roster tab: see Say who a participant is in Slack.

External rotations still behave like any other rotation for everything Slack-facing: shift start and end notifications, channel topic updates, and on-duty mentions and templating work as usual.

What you cannot change in Round Robin

Because the external schedule owns the rotation, some features are disabled:

Feature	Behavior on an external rotation
Members and user groups	Not editable: the on-call pool is synced from the provider and any change would be overwritten
Manual rotation / set duty	Blocked: duty is driven by the external schedule
Internal schedules	Blocked: you cannot add a Round Robin schedule on top
Business hours	Not available
Incoming webhooks	Not available

To change who is on call, edit the schedule in your provider; Round Robin picks it up on the next sync.

Disconnect an external schedule

1. Open the rotation’s Edit Schedule page. External rotations show an External Schedule alert explaining that the schedule cannot be edited here.
2. Click Disconnect external schedule and confirm.

Disconnecting removes the binding, stops the sync, and reverts the rotation to manual mode. The current on-call pool (as last synced) is kept as the starting member list, so you can keep rotating the same people by hand or add a Round Robin schedule (see Create or edit a schedule). You can re-link an external schedule at any time.

Disconnecting the integration itself, under Settings → Integrations, reverts every bound rotation to manual mode at once.

Next steps

• PagerDuty, OpsGenie and Jira Service Management based rotations: the provider-side walkthrough, with screenshots.
• Integrate PagerDuty, Integrate OpsGenie or Integrate Jira Service Management: connecting a provider in the first place.
• Round Robin in Slack: everything Slack-facing still works the same way.