Guides
7 guides on on-call. Practical writing from the team building Atlas, useful whether or not you buy anything.
When most pages need no action, people learn to ignore pages, including the one that matters. Alert fatigue is a reliability risk and a retention risk at once.
Schedules assume that everyone is available. They are not. A clear, simple swap policy keeps the pager covered without leaving the schedule disagreeing with reality.
Most on-call surprises are handover failures: something the last person knew and the next person did not. A short written handover removes most of them.
There is no single best on-call schedule. There are patterns that suit particular team sizes, locations and paging volumes. Here are five, with the trade-offs of each.
On-call management decides who answers when something breaks, what happens if they do not, and how to ask people to carry that duty without wearing them out.
A severity scale decides how loudly to respond. Defined well, it removes argument during an incident. Defined badly, it is either ignored or abused.
Incident management is how a team detects a problem, responds in an organised way, tells the people affected and learns enough to prevent a repeat. This guide covers the whole process.
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