Cover holidays with rotation overrides

An override is a hard “user X is on call from time A to time B” entry that beats every layer in the schedule. It’s the right tool for:

Vacation cover: “Carol is covering Alice’s week while she’s at a wedding.”
One-off swaps: “I’ll take your Tuesday if you take my Thursday.”
Filling layer gaps: if a layer’s effective window leaves a hole, override the gap.

Overrides do not modify the underlying rotation. Once the override expires, the rotation continues as if it never happened: Alice will still be next-up the week she’d normally have rotated to.

Open the schedule, click Overrides → Add override.
Pick the user to put on call, the start and end timestamps.
Save.

curl -X POST https://api.siteqwality.com/on_call_schedule/$SCHEDULE_ID/override \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SITEQWALITY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "user_id": "33333333-aaaa-4bbb-9ccc-ffffffffffff",
    "start_at": "2026-12-22T09:00:00Z",
    "end_at": "2027-01-02T09:00:00Z"
  }'

Times are RFC 3339 with timezone. The schedule’s own timezone doesn’t apply to override timestamps; they’re absolute.

Common patterns

Whole-week vacation cover

Single override covering the entire week. Carol takes over from Alice 09:00 Monday through 09:00 the following Monday. Both start_at and end_at must be set.

Daily swap

Two overrides: each engineer takes the other’s day. Each override is one calendar day, both saved with explicit start/end.

Patch a gap in a layer

If your weekly rotation has effective_from: 2026-06-01 and you have an incident before then, the layer doesn’t apply. Add an override covering the period until the layer kicks in.

Overlapping overrides

If two overrides cover the same time, the most recently created one wins. Don’t rely on this; instead, delete or shorten the earlier one before adding a conflicting one.

Removing an override

curl -X DELETE https://api.siteqwality.com/on_call_schedule/$SCHEDULE_ID/override/$OVERRIDE_ID \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SITEQWALITY_API_KEY"

The dashboard’s per-schedule Overrides list has a delete button per row.