On-Call Processes and Policies - Holiday Coverage Planning

During the year, team members ordinarily space their PTO out. However, between mid-November and mid-January, many team members wish to take time off to celebrate the holiday season.

Several regional holidays occur in this period along with Family and Friends days. To ensure coverage, we plan all shifts from mid-November through mid-January ahead of time.

GitLab continues to operate during this period and all rotations require standard ordinary coverage during this time.

Rotation leaders must pay special attention to PTO during these times to ensure adequate coverage on their rotation.

Every year, there is a general holiday coverage epic created in the gitlab-com/gl-infra group and rotation leaders will be assigned to remind them to create their own coverage issues and attach them to this epic.

Planning Timeline

• August 15th - Holiday coverage planning must begin - the general holiday coverage epic will be opened at this time
• October 1st - Final holiday coverage plans must be published

In past years we’ve experimented with starting this process at later times but found many team members already have travel and family plans booked prior to October.

Coverage Options

Rotation leaders are responsible for arranging their rotation’s coverage. This can be done through several suggested approaches:

• Extended shifts: Team members cover longer periods (12-hours instead of 8-hours). Not currently recommended for 24x5 rotations.
• Trades and Overrides: Team members who are not scheduled can provide coverage for primary on-call engineers
• Cross-team support: Coordination with related teams that have overlapping expertise
• Splitting the shift: Have several team members each cover a smaller time period

Can a rotation leader deny leave?

According to the PTO Policy, a manager needs to request a change to PTO plans within 48 hours of those plans being entered into Workday.

We ask for end-of-year planning to begin in August so that we can be ahead of PTO requests.

If you are a rotation leader, inform managers of team members in your rotations of this process.

Communication Requirements

• Rotation owners must communicate holiday plans to the Networking and Incident Management team by attaching an issue with their coverage plan schedule to the general holiday coverage epic.
• Any changes to normal escalation procedures during holidays must be documented
• Holiday coverage information should be shared in the relevant team channels and with stakeholders
• Overrides should be entered into incident.io as soon as the coverage plan is finalized.

Time off substitution

There is guidance linked in the Family and Friends day page and Public Holiday section on utilizing these days on another day.