On-Call Rotation

Sarah Weir, Software Engineer, Artsy

Sarah covers: • Artsy's motivation for formalizing support • The research they undertook and the goals they established • The initial on-call plan they established

GitLab, Editorial Team, GitLab

GitLab's internal process document for on-call rotations covers: • Expectations for On-Call • On-Call Rotation processes for Customer Emergencies, Reliability Engineering, Security, Development Team, and Quality Team

Will Larson, Foundation Engineering, Stripe

Will argues that on-call should not split into multiple shifts within a 24-hour window, with reasons that include: • Shifts start to turn into service windows, as opposed to exception management • Shift transitions magnify error rate • Humans are too slow, anyway; the focus should be on automation that prevents exceptions

Jeffrey Starr, Staff Engineer, Qualtrics

The Qualtrics team shares their experience using wargames to train new employees and stress test their on-call processes and runbooks.

Ryn Daniels, Senior SRE II, HashiCorp

Ryn explains: • When to trigger off-hours alerts • How to track how many off-hours alerts occur • Creating and sustaining work/life balance