Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

An on-call schedule forms the backbone of your incident response system in the event of an outage or when an issue is raised. This type of schedule does not keep end-users waiting and helps maintain the reliability and availability of your software. However, on-call management practices often induce worry and anxiety in team members. In extreme cases, it can even be a contributing factor in employee burnout.

‍ On-call management is one of the most important aspects of seamless IT service. Its aim is to ensure that the right person is notified in the case of an incident, so that they can react accordingly as quickly as possible. In certain cases, many people have to be notified. To achieve this as efficiently as possible, it is vital to have an up-to-date and smoothly functioning system.

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.

Nowadays, organizations address a high volume of incidents everyday. With so much happening, responders can be overwhelmed by the volume of incidents and may end up de-prioritizing certain important incidents. Hence, it is important to have an efficient on-call scheduling and escalation process in place. In this blog, we will explore how Round Robin Escalations can help distribute on-call load and set up efficient on-call schedules. This blog covers the following pointers.