Back to the Guide
On-call
On-call is the contract your team makes with its users: when something breaks, a real person is reachable and able to act. These sections cover how to build a rotation people can live with, escalation that always finds someone, and paging that earns the interruption.
In this chapter
- Building a humane on-call rotationHow to design an on-call schedule that protects your engineers, distributes load fairly, and still guarantees that every page reaches a human who can act.
- Writing alerts worth waking up forEvery alert is a promise that something needs a human right now. Learn to write alerts that page only when that promise is true — and to delete the ones that aren't.
- Designing escalation that always finds someoneA page that goes unanswered is worse than no page at all. Learn to build escalation paths that route around a sleeping responder, respect working hours across time zones, and guarantee that every alert eventually reaches a human who can act.
- Following the sun without burning anyoneRound-the-clock coverage does not have to mean round-the-clock suffering. Learn how follow-the-sun rotations, working-hours rules, and humane compensation let a global team hold the pager all night without anyone losing their nights.