As the world has moved online, we’ve grown to expect that everything works around the clock. Organizations are investing more and more into maintaining their systems, searching high and low for ways to make them more reliable. Yet a key resource is hiding in plain sight: your people. Your developers and operators are the last line of defense against getting your systems back online, but we give the practice of on-call barely any thought.
Designing on-call looks deceptively easy and is often done ad hoc. But ineffective on-call design can lead to slower incident response and diminished well-being for those on-call, including burnout and attrition. Effective and sustainable on-call, on the other hand, yields substantive benefits and helps operators learn about their systems and improve how they support them.
Experts Jaime Woo and Emil Stolarsky guide you through the key components of on-call, from training, scheduling, and rotations to incident response and evaluation. On-call is an accepted part of an operator's life, and being intentional about it is the best way to ensure that the team stays healthy and sustainable. Join in to learn how it’s done.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
By the end of this recording of a live online course, you’ll understand:
- When you need to establish on-call
- How to create playbooks
- How to create healthy on-call rotations
- How companies can fight pager fatigue
- Whether or not to compensate workers for being on-call
- The tools you can use to help with on-call
And you’ll be able to:
- Follow best practices for on-call to build a healthy and sustainable culture
- Evaluate if your on-call process is “working”
- Spot the signs of a poor on-call process
- Manage stakeholders around on-call culture
This recording of a live event is for you because…
- You’re a developer, operator, or manager involved with on-call.
- You work with systems that require on-call support.
- You want to become an effective and supportive manager for your people.
Prerequisites
- Experience running software in production environments
- Familiarity with on-call processes
Recommended preparation:
- Read “Being On-Call” (chapter 11 in Site Reliability Engineering)
Recommended follow-up: