Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

On-call is a special working hour arrangement under employment law. It comes into effect when the employee is obliged to be contactable at least by phone, so they can start work in an emergency. On-call duty is generally counted as time specifically meant for work purposes. In practice, this means that employees are normally not allowed to work while on-call. However, there may be exceptions. For example, on-call employees may also work from home if they can be reached through their work device.

We’ve been celebrating a few big milestones 🎉 at incident.io in the last few months. We were recently discussing product metrics (as you do for fun on a Friday afternoon 🤓) , and Lawrence was very surprised with a particular stat around the number of workflows that have been run using incident.io.

“Well, that’s the job.” Have you ever heard that from your colleagues or bosses when it came to being on-call? Imagine you started a new job 3 months ago and were looking forward to it from the start. You are on-call one weekend a month and thought there wouldn’t be many incidents from Friday evening to Monday morning. But by now you’ve noticed how much being on-call duty actually stresses you out. You get restless as soon as your shift starts.

Your company has a product/service that needs to be up and running 24/7 or serving customers worldwide? Heads up, you might need an on-call team. In this article, we’ll start with the basics of what is on-call and why it is important.

A while ago, I wrote about how we track on-call health, and I heard from various people about how “expecting to be woken up” can be extremely unhealthy, or how tracking the number of disruptions would actually be useful. I took that feedback to heart and wanted to address the issues they raised, and also provide some numbers that explain the position I took with these metrics on alerts.

For the vast majority of organisations, some form of round-the-clock cover is critical to successful business operations. On-call is an essential part of an effective incident response process, yet there is no commonly accepted playbook on how to most effectively structure and compensate on-callers. We ran a survey to uncover the mysteries of how on-call works in organisations of different shapes and sizes around the world.

“It’s too expensive!” “Do we really need another tool?” “Our APM works just fine.” With strapped tech budgets and an abundance of tooling, it can be hard to justify a new expense—or something new for engineers to learn. Especially when they feel their current tool does the job adequately. But, does it?

I've never been on call before, and I'm not sure what to expect, or how I can best prepare for it. Will I need to upend my life just in case the pager goes off? And how should I best cope with getting paged? I've read Charity's piece on the opposite problem of wanting to stop being on call, but it didn't quite answer my question.

If you have an on-call rotation, you want it to be a healthy one. But this is sort of hard to measure because it has very abstract qualities to it. For example, are you feeling burnt out? Does it feel like you’re supported properly? Is there a sense of impending doom? Do you think everything is under control? Is it clashing with your own private life? Do you feel adequately equipped to deal with the challenges you may be asked to meet? Is there enough room given to recover after incidents?