The On-Call Survival Guide

Best Practices for Being On-Call

Welcome to the on-call life. Being on-call can be a daunting experience for any new team member. There is only one thing worse than being woken up at 3am to discover that your systems are down — to wake up on your own at 8am and discover that your systems were down for 5 hours and nobody
got the alert!

With the right approach, a culture of collaboration, infrastructure insight, and the right tools in place, being on-call doesn’t have to be so bad.

In this On-Call Survival Guide:

What is “On-Call”?
On-call responsibilities (and not responsibilities)
On-call etiquette to follow
Recommendations for starting your own on-call rotations

^{This guide is a look at how PagerDuty prepares its team members for going on-call. It’s our hope that you’ll use this as a starting point to formalize you own processes.}