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Follow-the-sun escalation pages the team that is awake. This guide gates an escalation policy’s layers with working hours conditions so a daytime incident reaches your UK rotation during UK hours and your US rotation otherwise — without maintaining parallel policies. For the concepts behind it, see Working hours and Escalation policies.
Managing this from a script or pipeline instead? See the follow-the-sun section of the Escalation policies API guide, or manage it as code with the scaling_working_hours Terraform resource.

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Prerequisites

  • Two on-call schedules — one per region — that you want to page at different times of day. See Set Up On-call.
  • An escalation policy you can add layers to.
1

Create the working hours sets

Open the Working Hours page (/working-hours) and click Create working hours. Each set carries its own timezone — it is never inferred from a schedule — and one or more weekly windows.Create a UK office hours set:
  • Name — UK office hours.
  • Timezone — Europe/London.
  • Weekly windows — toggle Mon–Fri and set the window to 09:00–17:00. Use Add window for split hours.
Click Create, then repeat for a US office hours set (America/New_York, Mon–Fri 08:00–18:00).
2

Gate the layers with conditions

Open your escalation policy and add (or edit) two layers. On each layer’s form, set the Working Hours Condition:
  • Layer 1 — target the UK rotation, choose Only during working hours, and pick the UK office hours set.
  • Layer 2 — target the US rotation, choose Only during working hours, and pick the US office hours set.
Order layer 1 above layer 2.
Choose Only outside working hours when you want a layer to participate only outside a set’s windows — for example a night-shift layer gated outside UK office hours. You never need to author a mirror “after hours” set. Leave the condition on Always (no condition) to make a layer unconditional.
3

Preview who would be paged right now

Skip-cascades make “who gets paged when” hard to read from the layer list alone, so the policy detail page shows a Who would be paged right now preview. It evaluates every layer’s condition at the current instant and tells you which layer a page would actually reach:
  • During UK hours, it resolves to layer 1 (UK rotation).
  • Outside UK hours but during US hours, layer 1 is skipped and it resolves to layer 2 (US rotation).
Conditions are evaluated at the instant escalation reaches the layer, never at incident creation — a page raised at 08:50 that escalates at 09:05 correctly reaches a layer gated during 09:00–17:00.
4

Understand skip and the backstop

Two rules make this safe:
  • Skip, never wait. A layer whose condition does not hold is skipped and escalation proceeds to the next layer immediately. scaling.cloud cannot hold a page until working hours begin — a page that reached an escalation policy was already judged worth waking someone for.
  • Backstop. If every layer’s condition fails at an evaluation instant, the last layer is paged unconditionally. A page never silently dies to misconfiguration — even if that means paging the last layer outside its own hours.
When every layer on a policy is conditional, the preview shows a non-blocking advisory: “Every layer is conditional. If all conditions fail, the last layer is paged unconditionally.” It never blocks the save; it just makes the backstop legible. A good pattern is to make your final layer unconditional — a manager or fallback schedule — so the page lands somewhere deliberate.

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Next steps

Working hours concept

Timezone semantics, the org default used by insights, and deletion rules.

Manage working hours as code

The scaling_working_hours Terraform resource and the step condition block.