PagerDuty On-Call Handoff SMS Reminder

Overview

This flow smooths PagerDuty on-call handoffs. It runs on a schedule aligned to each shift boundary, reads the current on-call roster from PagerDuty, summarizes the open incidents, texts the incoming on-call engineer via Twilio, and posts the same handoff summary to a Microsoft Teams channel. The SMS asks the engineer to reply ACK to confirm they have the handoff.

Why it matters: Context is easily lost at shift boundaries. A proactive handoff carrying open-incident context - delivered by SMS, which on-call staff actually read - reduces dropped balls between responders. Flow ships Off; going live requires only authorizing the three connections and setting the environment-variable values.

Use Case

An on-call rotation wants the incoming engineer to begin their shift with a clear picture of what is open and in flight, pushed to their phone and to the team channel, with an explicit acknowledgement step. Audience: IT Admins, Operations. Skill level: Intermediate.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Connector	API name	Actions used
PagerDuty	shared_pagerduty	GetActiveIncidents
Twilio	shared_twilio	SendMessage
Microsoft Teams	shared_teams	PostMessageToConversation

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Two-way ACK (production upgrade)

Add a second flow triggered by a Twilio inbound webhook (built-in Request trigger reading triggerFormDataValue From/Body) that records the acknowledgement and, if no ACK arrives within a threshold, escalates to the secondary on-call.

Time-zone aware handoffs

Duplicate the run, or change timeZone/hours, so each rotation fires at its own local shift-change time.

Escalation note

Extend Compose_Sms_Body / Compose_Teams_Html with the secondary on-call (a second /oncalls read at escalation_level=2) so the incoming engineer knows who to escalate to.

Multi-schedule fan-out

Wrap actions 10-26 in an Apply-to-each over the schedule IDs to notify each schedule's incoming engineer separately.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

@concat(variables('varApiBase'), '/oncalls?time_zone=UTC&earliest=true&include[]=users&since=', utcNow(), '&until=', addHours(utcNow(),1), '&schedule_ids[]=', join(split(variables('varScheduleIds'),','),'&schedule_ids[]='))

@if(greater(length(outputs('Compose_OnCalls_Array')),0), coalesce(first(outputs('Compose_OnCalls_Array'))?['user']?['id'],''), '')

@if(greater(length(body('Filter_Sms_Methods')),0), concat('+', string(coalesce(first(body('Filter_Sms_Methods'))?['country_code'],1)), first(body('Filter_Sms_Methods'))?['address']), variables('varFallbackSms'))

@length(coalesce(body('Get_Open_Incidents')?['incidents'], json('[]')))

@concat('Token token=', variables('varToken'))

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