On-call basics

Topic: Monitoring basics

Set up on-call rotation and escalation. Route alerts to primary and secondary. Use when you need someone to respond to incidents 24/7 or during business hours.

Intent: How-to

Quick answer

  • Define rotation: who is primary and secondary. Use PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or similar. Set schedule and override.
  • Alerts route to primary. Escalate to secondary or manager if not acknowledged within SLA. Document escalation path.
  • Limit alert fatigue. Tune alerts; use runbooks. Track load and balance rotation.

Prerequisites

Steps

  1. Rotation and tool

    Define primary and secondary. Configure PagerDuty or tool. Set schedule and overrides.

  2. Escalation

    Escalate if not acked in X minutes. Document path. Test escalation.

  3. Tune and balance

    Reduce noise. Use runbooks. Balance rotation; track pages per person.

Summary

Set rotation and tool; route alerts to primary; escalate per SLA; tune and balance load.

Prerequisites

Steps

Step 1: Rotation and tool

Define primary and secondary; configure tool; set schedule.

Step 2: Escalation

Escalate after timeout; document path; test.

Step 3: Tune and balance

Reduce noise; runbooks; balance rotation.

Verification

  • Alert reaches primary; escalation works; load acceptable.

Troubleshooting

No one paged — Check routing and schedule. Too many pages — Tune alerts and thresholds.

Next steps

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