Incidents are a stressful time for your team: your service isn't working the way you expect and your customers/stakeholders want to know what's going on. The last thing you want to do is let your team improvise everything when it comes to responding to incidents. Google's own SRE book has great overall tips for incident management, part of which involves "develop(ing) and document(ing) your incident management procedures in advance", which this article dives into.

It’s 3am. You wake up to a blaring alarm, the sound burned into your soul from countless sleepless nights. You reach for your phone, ‘press 4 to acknowledge’ and bleary eyed, you open your laptop, grab a coffee and get to work. The next hour is a whirlwind—bringing services back online, keeping colleagues in the loop, maintaining a list of action items, updating a status page that will be seen by millions of customers. Potentially for the fifth time this month.

TL;DR You deserve a better alerting and on-call tool. So we built Signals. In our early days, we often used the tagline, “You just got paged. Now what?” It encapsulated how FireHydrant solved for all of the messy bits that come after your alert is fired, from incident declaration all the way through to retrospective. At the time, we saw alerting and on-call scheduling as a solved problem.

Whether a business is small scale, medium-sized, or a large enterprise, downtime issues can affect any organization as no business is exempt from experiencing downtime. However, the swifter the acknowledgment of an issue, the quicker the response, resulting in a reduced impact on business. An effective On-Call framework not only aids in prompt issue resolution but also plays a vital role in minimizing the overall downtime impact on business operations.

Once you set up an on-call team, the next step is to decide their compensation. There might be several questions in your mind right now: "How do we fairly value on-call time?" "Is it a flat rate or hourly?" and a few others. So we are here to help you set up an on-call compensation system because we know compensating people fairly lays the foundation of a healthy business. Are you still stuck on setting up an on-call team? Read this guide first: 7 steps to set up an on-call team.

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.