Coverage Gaps

A gap is a stretch of time your schedule doesn't assign to anybody. This page explains how to spot one, what happens if an alert lands in it, and how to close it.

The short version

An alert is never thrown away. If nobody is scheduled when an alert fires, we call everyone eligible for that schedule instead.

Waking someone who wasn't expecting it is recoverable. A production incident nobody hears about is not. So we'd rather over-call than go quiet.

How gaps happen

Almost always by narrowing hours and not covering what's left over. For example:

Rotation "Business hours"   Mon-Fri 9am-5pm
(nothing else)

→ Every evening, every night, and both weekend days are a gap.

The other common one is an off-by-an-hour: a rotation that starts at 9am looks fine all day, but an alert at 8am has nobody scheduled.

Spotting a gap

Gaps show up in four places, so you don't have to go looking:

Where	What you'll see
On call now	An amber card reading "Nobody on call", with when coverage resumes
Calendar	A hatched amber chip, e.g. No one 8:00–9:00 AM
Timeline	A hatched amber band in the lane
Rotations editor	"X hours has nobody on call" under Resulting schedule

Anything hatched and amber means nobody, and that's the only thing it means.

Closing a gap

Pick whichever fits:

Widen an existing rotation's hours. If 8am alerts are real, start at 8am.
Add a catch-all rotation. Create a rotation, leave it always on call, and put it at the bottom of the list in One person at a time mode. It only covers hours the rotations above leave free — so it quietly picks up every night and weekend without touching your business-hours setup. This is the usual answer.
Use an override for a one-off. Good for "just this weekend", not for a hole that comes back every night.

After any change, check Resulting schedule says "Every hour of the next 14 days is covered."

Deliberate gaps are allowed

Some teams genuinely don't want anyone called at 3am on a Sunday. That's a legitimate choice and we don't stop you — but be clear about what it means:

An alert in that window still calls everybody eligible, because the alternative is silence. If you want nobody called, the right tool is the flow, not the schedule: don't send that alert overnight in the first place, or route it to email only.

"Why did I get called when I wasn't on call?"

This is the most likely reason. If an alert fires in a gap, everyone eligible for the schedule is called, so you can be paged on a night that isn't your turn.

Those notifications are marked internally with the reason, and an admin can confirm it from the notification's history. If it's happening regularly, the schedule has a gap somebody needs to close — see above.

Two other possibilities worth ruling out:

An override. Someone may have assigned you the window. Check the Overrides list on the schedule.
Everyone on call together. If the schedule is set to page all overlapping rotations at once, you'll be called alongside others whenever your rotation's hours apply. See Rotations & coverage hours.

"No coverage" vs a gap

These look similar and mean different things:

	Means	Anyone called?
Hatched amber — a gap	Nobody is scheduled, and nobody meant it that way	Yes — everyone eligible
"No coverage" — a grey slot	Somebody deliberately put an empty slot in the rotation	Yes — same fallback applies

The difference matters when you're reading a schedule: grey means someone chose it, amber means the configuration simply never said.