On-call handoff template: what to write when the shift changes

A good on-call handoff takes five minutes and saves the next person an hour of digging. The people leaving the shift know things the tools do not show: which alert is noise, which fix is half done, who already complained. Write it down once, in one place, at the same time every week.

The template

Copy this into a channel message, a doc or a ticket, and fill it in before the shift changes:

On-call handoff: [team], [date]
From: [name]   To: [name]

1. Open incidents
   - [link] what is happening, what was tried, what is next
2. Things that may come back
   - [alert or customer] why it fired, what fixed it, how to tell it is back
3. Changes in flight
   - [deploy, migration, config change] state, owner, rollback
4. Noisy or flaky alerts
   - [alert] safe to ignore until [condition]
5. Follow-ups promised
   - [who was told what, by when]
6. Where to look
   - Runbook: [link]   Dashboard: [link]   Escalation: [name or channel]

Five rules that keep a handoff useful

Hand over at a fixed time, the same weekday and hour. A handoff that happens "when someone remembers" is skipped in the weeks that matter.
Write it, do not only say it. A message in the team channel can be searched months later; a call cannot.
Name the open incidents first. Everything else is secondary to what is on fire.
Say what you tried and what did not work. The next person should not repeat your dead ends.
The incoming person replies "got it". It confirms they read it and know they are on call now.

Make the shift change itself automatic

The template covers what to say. The other half is making sure everyone knows who is on call and when it changes. In Dutyroll the rotation posts in your channel at the hand-over time: who is on call, who is next, with Skip and Swap with next buttons. The optional extra line under the name is a good place for the link to your runbook or to the handoff document:

On call this week: @dana. Next: @lee.
Handoff notes: https://wiki.example.com/handoff
[Skip] [Swap with next]

The outgoing person can reply in the thread of that post with the filled-in template, so the handoff sits right under the announcement.

Need the schedule first? Our free rotation schedule generator builds the whole year from your names.

Add to Slack Free for one rotation. Pro is $9/month per workspace.

Next, Slack asks you to sign in to your workspace, then shows Dutyroll's 4 permissions before you press Allow: add the /dutyroll command, post messages, post in public channels without an invite, and see the member list (names, time zones). Dutyroll never reads messages. Not in the Slack Marketplace yet: Slack lists apps only after 10 workspaces use them. Free plan: 1 rotation, no card.

Set it up in two minutes

Add Dutyroll to Slack (the workspace admin may need to approve it).
In the channel where the hand-over should appear, type /dutyroll new.
Fill in the form: the duty's name, the people in order, the channel, weekly (pick the day), every weekday, every 2 weeks or monthly (pick the day of the month or the last Friday, say), and the time. The time is in your Slack time zone.
Dutyroll posts an announcement now, and the hand-over at the time you chose: who is on duty and who is next, with Skip and Swap with next buttons.

What Dutyroll does not do

It does not page or call anyone and has no escalation; it posts a message in a channel. If you need phone or SMS alerts, use a paging tool and keep Dutyroll (or not) for the visible weekly hand-over.
It does not sync with PagerDuty, Opsgenie or calendars (it can publish the rota as a read-only calendar link, see /dutyroll calendar), and does not update a Slack user group (@oncall) yet.
Cadences are weekly (one day), every weekday (Mon-Fri), every 2 weeks or monthly (a day of the month, or the last Friday, say, of it). No custom shift lengths. Away dates are entered in Dutyroll (Mark away, and the hand-over skips that person); there is no sync of away dates from a calendar or HR tool.
It is new (October 2026) and not yet in the Slack Marketplace; you install it from this site.