In the era of reliability, where mere minutes of downtime or latency can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, 24x7 availability and on-call coverage to respond to incidents has become a requirement for the vast majority of organizations. But setting up an on-call system that drives effective incident response while minimizing the stress placed on engineers isn’t a trivial task.

On-call scheduling enables 24/7/365 availability of service providers for critical issues like system downtime, technician response for critical systems, and patient care. Learn about the importance of on-call schedules for your organization and its customers, how to design an on-call schedule, and multiple ways you can build an on-call scheduling program that will improve customer response and make staff happier.

OnPage’s incident alert management platform continues to evolve, providing powerful features and capabilities to clients. The OnPage product team proactively monitors requests for future advancements and launches them to enhance clients’ business processes. Continuous innovation allows OnPage to align with growing business needs, while adapting to the ever-changing trends of the digital operations world.

And it starts with the company culture. Irrespective of how small or large your team is, it’s wise to invest some time in creating a good on-call onboarding plan. A humane on-call is the mark of a good engineering culture. Being on-call means that you’re expected to be reachable for any issues that may occur during your shift. It’s easy to lose any and all motivation by just anxiously anticipating that mid-dinner ping.

A lot of tech companies struggle with creating an effective and efficient on-call schedule internally for their product and service, this results in much longer downtimes when something goes wrong. They often over-burden their team members with repeated on-call duty which results in team member fatigue. Here’s how to create an on-call schedule that your team might love.

Alert noise is a very common on-call complaint leading to fatigue and on-call burnout. This article is an attempt at helping folks address this problem.

It sucks to be on-call when processes are not well defined and streamlined. Especially around the holidays. You really don't want to hear your phone repeatedly going off right when you're sitting for Christmas dinner with your loved ones or getting to unwrapping the good presents (the ones with the sparkly wrapping paper :P). Your on-call team’s stress levels reflects the health of your system, the cleanliness of your code and the culture of your organization.

At Sensu Summit 2019, Adam Westman, Sr. Engineering Manager at Target, introduced us to GoAlert, their on-call scheduling and notification open source project. In this post, I’ll recap his talk, sharing the journey that led them to build GoAlert, the problems they’ve solved, and how they use GoAlert with Sensu Go to simplify monitoring and reduce alert fatigue.