Navigating an extensive excel sheet to determine On-Call schedules and vacation plans can be daunting. The struggle of maintaining On-Call Schedules manually is real. But we've got a solution that can help. This blog addresses the challenges associated with manualOn Call Scheduling processes.

Critical information during Incident Management includes the incident's nature, impact, urgency, affected systems, and current status, enabling efficient resolution. Yet, the excessive details in incident notifications frequently hinders rather than aiding the process.

It's fair to say that effectively managing an on-call rota is crucial for ensuring the 'round-the-clock availability of your services. But it's more than that. Spending the time getting your rotas right also empowers and protects the folks who make it all possible: your team. Some best practices for doing this include using software to automate scheduling, setting up teams with clearly defined responsibilities, establishing escalation policies, and defining time limits for issue resolution.

Asking engineers to be on-call is usually a tough sell. Think about it: if someone asked you to add even more to your already packed workload, that would be a difficult proposition to say yes to. And that’s before you mention that this work typically happens late into the day and even (some) sleepless nights. Companies need to have an on-call function to keep their services and products running smoothly—it’s practically a non-negotiable at this point.

Being on-call isn’t likely to be the most enjoyable aspect of a job. In fact, there might be a certain level of stress and fear around engineering teams about going on call: maybe the page will be missed, or maybe a page will come in at 2am and require troubleshooting a production issue for hours.

Most software engineers know that they are typically tasked with on-call shifts, but new software engineers entering the field may be asking themselves – What do I even do if I get scheduled for an on-call shift? This is a common question that often doesn’t get answered until that first on-call shift, and unfortunately that can be overwhelming for a young professional who is nervous about their first on-call shift, let alone their first incident.

Whenever you're providing a service to businesses or individuals that they rely on, it's important to make sure that it's up and running as much as possible without disruptions. But the reality is that, despite your best efforts, downtime does happen. Regardless of when incidents strike, whether it’s 2 PM in the middle of the working day or 2 AM, it's important to have people available to diagnose and resolve issues as soon as possible.