The holidays amplify an inherent risk to businesses: lighter staffing, heavier traffic, and zero appetite for surprises. In addition to locking in your coverage crew and sharing the list so teams know who to contact, here’s how to prepare so calm is the default.

Step 1: Deck the tasks before you deck the halls

Start by sanity‑checking your on‑call rotations as a team so there are no last‑minute surprises. Ensure on-call responsibilities and runbooks are clearly defined and up to date to avoid stress during an incident or on-call handoff. Then leverage the Shift Agent with Google Calendar and Slack integration in PagerDuty so the busywork (like checking for shift conflicts, asking your team for coverage and creating necessary overrides) stays automated. Your PagerDuty Admin can enable the Google Calendar Integration for your account in under 5 minutes, just make sure you have a valid authentication token uploaded and domain‑wide delegation turned on so the app can access calendar data via Google APIs. The app only reads OOO (out‑of‑office) events and relevant details, and we store that data within our domain.

Once an OOO event is stored internally, it triggers conflict detection. The agentic app scans all on-call shifts for that user and emits a conflict event, which is then consumed by downstream services like Slack and the notification service. The event is enriched by PagerDuty Advance to guide and assist the user, saving cognitive overload and precious time at their end. If, for any reason, the notifications get noisy, you can set a preference to filter out conflicts less than the specified duration. 

Example: If you want to get notified only when conflicts are greater than a day, you can choose to notify users for conflicts over 1 day.

Use a different calendar app? You can still chat with the Shift Agent directly in Slack by prompting “I’m out the last two weeks of Dec, who can cover for me?”. Or prefer your own tooling? You can also export PagerDuty Schedules to Third‑Party Apps and plug them into your internal automations.

Step 2: Set your out of office (and your boundaries)

Mark your time off on your calendar as OOO events, including company holidays, vacations, and personal days. Shift Agent uses calendar availability to provide user recommendations, so keeping it updated helps filter out unavailable teammates and connects people with teammates who are actually around to help. It’s a small step that makes a big difference in keeping your workflows smooth and efficient. 

Under the hood, the agent pulls context from PagerDuty: your teams, schedules, escalation policies, and current on‑call shifts. It factors in:

• Timeline: “this week,” “next week,” or specific dates
• Timezones: your local timezone and the schedule’s timezone
• Conflicts: existing OOO events and overlapping shifts

When there’s a shift conflict, it recommends coverage by scoring candidates on:

• Proximity: teammates closest to you across teams, schedules, and escalation policies
• Availability: who’s not marked OOO during that window
• Workload: balanced shift distribution so no one gets overloaded

Example: If you’re on SRE schedule next week and book PTO, Shift Agent notices the conflict, checks who’s on your schedule, filters out anyone OOO, prefers folks with lighter recent load, and recommends who can help cover for you saving you the ping pong and guesswork.

Step 3: Spread cheer, not sneer

A little goodwill goes a long way. When teams align on expectations, share context openly, and surface gaps early, misunderstandings disappear and so does unnecessary stress.

When override requests pop up from teammates, respond quickly – accept or decline so people can plan their time. 

With our Slack integration, you can:

• Request an override from the right teammates via DM
• Accept or decline with a single click
• See conflicts across multiple schedules

All of this rides on our event‑driven architecture: conflict events flow through the notification pipeline to Slack in near real time, so the agent scales gracefully during the busy holiday stretch without dropping the ball. Watch this demo to see Shift Agent in action.

Holiday readiness the PagerDuty way

Incidents don’t take holidays, and neither do our customers’ needs. Here’s how we keep the lights on while our teams actually get a break. Our teams huddle in early November to review on-call rotations, inspect our runbooks, share OOO dates, and swap a few witty tales about what we’re excited for (and what we’re not). We add the OOO events to our own calendars for automated conflict detection and to a shared team calendar for visibility. We proactively scale relevant services for a surge in volume and take our change freeze seriously, no releases during that window. There’s a reason we call it hibernation duty: when the whole company takes the same time off (except for a small coverage crew), it gives everyone space to unplug, enjoy time with family and friends, and recharge for an exciting year ahead.

And when duty calls, we ack and own it – because our customers count on us to keep their businesses running.