We have people in five time zones reporting to three different supervisors/team leads, with shifts staggered for maximal coverage. Today we have 25 permutations of folks on duty, and the company is growing fast, so the complexity is increasing. We need some sort of way to allow the team leads to enter shift descriptions, that we can keep separate from the paging rule sets. We've also got many hundreds of servers, and people are screaming for more sophisticated rule set management, but with BB we've got to duplicate 25 shift rules for each new change - and then modify each set whenever anyone moves around. Xymon makes the rules easier to *read* but doesn't lower the count.
If we have to write this tool, we will. If it lands on my plate, I'll set up a spreadsheet that saves as a CSV and write a perl program to parse the spreadsheet (if I fail to enlist someone who can do a GUI). But I'm still really hoping that someone somewhere has already done this! We can't possibly be the first to need this. And I'm a huge believer in trying to find code before starting from scratch.
My ideal program would have a web interface with 24x7 blocks and the ability to put who's on call into each block, allowing for multiple entries. Then the back end would set up the mail aliases or .forward files for tech on duty, oncall, backup (and be smart enough to know that if there's no tech on duty, go straight to the oncall)
thanks again for any thoughts Betsy