On-call rotation
A schedule that names who responds to production alerts outside normal work, with an escalation path if that person does not answer.
Without a rotation, the person who reacts is whoever happens to see the alert, usually the same senior engineer every time. A rotation spreads the load, makes time to acknowledge predictable and shows how noisy the alerts are. It only works with runbooks so the person on call can act on systems they did not build, and with compensation or time off agreed in the contract.
Related terms
- Runbook: A short document that tells someone else how to run a system: where it lives, how to deploy, how to recover.
- MTTD and MTTA (time to detect and acknowledge): MTTD is the average time from a failure starting to someone or something noticing it; MTTA is the time from the alert to a person taking it on.
- Incident severity levels (SEV1, SEV2): Agreed levels, usually SEV1 to SEV4, that say how bad an incident is and what response it gets: who is paged, who leads, how often customers hear from you.
- Postmortem (blameless): A written review after an incident: what happened, why, how it was handled and what changes so it does not repeat.
