on-call_guy

Ok great. will take a look

Ok, thanks. Is there a limit on how many alerts we can get in this Slack report?

Interesting. How is it different from PagerDuty offered integration with Slack? We can get notifications from Pagerduty right?

Yep, we do this in our team too (day time only though) and call it as "on-call buddy" for first couple of rotations.

I see...how does it really work though? Like if I am on-call for this week- would it show all my alerts in one place and then allow me to take some kind of actions? How does it solve the other issues like stale runbooks, etc?

Got it. I wish there was an up to date service level owner identified which will then reduce this to just a lookup and tagging. I have seen few engineering teams in other companies started doing that.

Yeah, JIRA could be handy and useful though you need to create tickets for every tasks with a rigorous monitoring with other backlog and story items.

Thanks for the link. It doesn't have much details. I have signed up though. Looking forward for getting more details about the solutions.

lol...yeah we have that established within the team now. But still a challenge to find out a right contact across teams at 3am in the morning if the issue is from another team. May be we should build a service level ownership list so that we can tag them (in addition to their on-call). Curious to know what level of ownership you were referring about?

I agree they can be improved. But they are not one-time activity. It should be a continuous process in order to really be efficient. Also every on-call person needs to be diligent about it. Otherwise, it aggregates in future.

Again, I am talking about the teams who are heavily loaded with alerts and incidences during on-call. In general, all these pain points very much vary depending on the on-call load. We also have a teams who do manage all of these easily as their on-call load is quite manageable. But solving for them in one place so that everyone from the team is on the same would be amazing.

Ok...Would love to know more about what is out there. The problem with current alerting solutions like PagerDuty, they are every extensive in terms of what they offer (scheduling, reliability, etc) but not quite tailored towards needs of on-call engineer to easily tag something or for management to get a view which alerts/incidents need attention.

Even xMatter which my wife's team use but never login as it crashes frequently and prefer to debug through logs :P

That's great. I think one of the issue in our process is we use wiki for on-call summary/hand-off notes. That's not ALWAYS very helpful as it has a dependency what engineers add to them. Also time and severity of the alerts make a difference as well. E.g. if they are triggered in the night/unfriendly time the first intuition of the engineer is to fix it and not to make a note or document unless there a easy way to do so. We use PagerDuty and I dont think it provides easy way to make those note or comments. So that leaves it to the engineers who need to do it after the fact. Some teammates do it rigorously where some dont. I think Management's challenge is also they can only push so much as it becomes an attrition risk :(

Yeah, I must agree it is a cultural issue at some extent. But honestly the on-call my current company is quite demanding. So during the on-call week, though engineers try to improve it they always run out of the time or miss few things which then puts burden on future on-call.

I think there should be a nice light weight tool which should give a clear summary and tracking mechanism which make this a quicker tasks. Even just to tag the runbooks which are not updated. All those notes get lost in documentations and never referred back.

Thank you. Its a great point and totally agree that a good management plays a big role in making life little easy. We did raise it to our management. But one of the limitations from their end is as well too many different tools and scattered information which do not give them full insights. For examples, its very hard to know which runbooks are stale and needs updates unless your frequently review them. Curious to know how such problems were solved?

Looks great