Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you have an on-call rotation, you want it to be a healthy one. But this is sort of hard to measure because it has very abstract qualities to it. For example, are you feeling burnt out? Does it feel like you’re supported properly? Is there a sense of impending doom? Do you think everything is under control? Is it clashing with your own private life? Do you feel adequately equipped to deal with the challenges you may be asked to meet? Is there enough room given to recover after incidents?

Being on call is challenging. It’s signing up to be operating complex services in a totally interruptible manner, at all hours of the day or night, with limited context. It’s therefore critical to have proper on-call on-boarding procedures, offer continuous training sessions, and continuously improve documentation. We also need to make sure people feel safe by providing ways to reduce their stress, and make room for questions to surface all sorts of uncertainties around our operations.

For the vast majority of organisations, it’s necessary to have some form of round the clock cover to support the business. Whilst it’s most commonly a concern for engineering, it’s increasingly common to have folks from various disciplines available out-of-hours. Irrespective of role, compensating people fairly is an important factor of running a healthy and effective on-call system.

Managing your on-call rotations just got a little less stressful. With Grafana 8.0, we introduced unified alerting, which centralizes alerting information into a single, searchable view. With the introduction of Grafana OnCall, an easy-to-use on-call management tool available in Grafana Cloud, you can now extend the alerting workflow in Grafana to ensure that the right notifications reach the right people at the right time using the right method.

Today we’re announcing the general availability of Grafana OnCall on Grafana Cloud for all paid and free plans. A big part of delivering great software is ensuring the right people get the right information when the inevitable incidents occur. We want to help you do that with Grafana OnCall, an easy-to-use, developer-first on-call management tool that’s built on top of the Grafana stack you know and love.

You may have heard of Round Robin Scheduling before and thought to yourself, is this right for my team? Understanding how Round Robin Scheduling can be used and what teams it works best for is important when considering this method of on-call. Additionally, it comes with some pitfalls you’ll want to avoid, as well as best practices to adopt. In this blog post, we’ll share everything you need to know about Round Robin Scheduling within PagerDuty and how to get started.

We’re excited to announce a new set of updates and enhancements to the PagerDuty platform. Recent updates from the product team include On-Call Management, Event Intelligence, and Mobile Products, to PagerDuty Community & Advocacy Events.

Your engineers probably dislike going on-call for your services. Some might even dread it. It doesn't have to be this way. With a few changes to how your team runs on-call, and deals with recurring alerts, you might find your team starting to enjoy it (as unimaginable as that sounds). I wrote this article as a follow-up to Getting over on-call anxiety.