Turn Zaps on/off based on a schedule that changes

Hi @aromweis 

What is the reason you need to turn on / off zaps on certain days? A simpler way would be to use Paths by Zapier for different workflow. 

BUT since this is what you need to do, there are several ways to do it: 

You can use Airtable to have 2 records, one of would be to turn on the zap and the other would be to turn off the zap(s). It would be a bit complicated though since you will have to change that on daily basis. 

You can use Schedule by Zapier as the trigger then use Airtable > Find Record action to find the Airtable record every day (it would be the same record) then use that to turn on the zap. 

Hi MohSwellam,

Thanks for the quick reply! The big picture: my company is very small. I am trying to manage our after-hours on-call rotation (only 2-3 people). We use Slack and have multiple channels. However, after-hours support uses just one of the channels (Sev01). I have set up Zaps so that all posts to just the Sev01 channel get sent as SMS messages to our cell phones. That is working fine.

Our on-call schedule changes from week to week and is never the same pattern twice! So what I want is to daily consult “today” on a schedule to see who is on-call. And then only send those after-hours Sev01 posts to that on-call person by having only that person’s Zap turned on.

We’d like to set up this on-call schedule at least 1 week in advance. Updating every day is not workable.

I will take a look at Airtable’s Find Record. And also Paths. (I’ve been using Zapier about 2 weeks so any and all guidance very appreciated!)

We’ve looked at PagerDuty, Opsgenie etc but they are all too expensive for what we need or too cumbersome to set up.

Hi and thanks so much for these wonderfully informative suggestions @Troy Tessalone  @christina.d   @MohSwellam !

What I wound up doing:

Trigger = daily at 7PM using Schedule by Zapier

Action = Find Record in Airtable that accesses a Filtered Grid View (filtered for “today”), search term of Name!=”” => this returns the name of person on call that day

Action = Paths (what a great thing these are!) with 3 branches, very simple text match on the name from the previous step, and whatever branch matches is whose Zap gets turned on (using Zapier Manager - Zap name is hardcoded in that branch to make life easier)

It all works just fine so many thanks again!

As an aside, I initially tried to make a more generic logic flow without using Paths. I got the on-call name from Airtable as above, and then tried using Find Zap in Zapier Manager to locate that person’s Zap. Although I could see in the testing step that Find Zap did figure out the correct target Zap, when I tried passing that output to Turn Zap On/Off in Zapier Manager, that Action always errored out that it couldn’t turn off the Zap. I wonder if that’s where I’d need the Zap ID mentioned by Troy? I abandoned that algorithm for the more straight-forward way above. What we need to do is pretty simple so hard-coding is fine.

🔥🔥🔥

This is awesome and way to build it so fast!

We appreciate you looping back around to share your solution here too - spreading the knowledge around is such a win. 

Thanks for bringing this to community and happy zapping!⚡️