On Call Handbook

On-Call Handbook

Before Your Shift

• Read recent incidents and postmortems
• Check the runbook is up to date for known issues
• Verify your access (production logs, dashboards, deployment tools)
• Know who to escalate to (your backup, senior engineers, manager)

During Your Shift

• Respond to alerts within the SLO (usually 5-15 min for SEV-1)
• Acknowledge every alert — silence means no one is looking
• Triage first: who is affected? How badly? Is data at risk?
• Communicate: post in the incident channel with status updates
• Mitigate before fixing: stop the bleeding first

Triage Flow

1. Is this real? (check monitoring, confirm with user reports)
2. What's the severity? (SEV-1/2/3/4)
3. Who needs to know? (team, manager, wider org)
4. What's the immediate fix? (rollback, feature flag, restart)
5. Document the timeline

Handoff

• Write a clear handoff document: what's happening, what was tried, what's next
• Walk through the current state with the incoming on-call
• Don't hand off in the middle of an incident — stay until resolved or explicitly handed over
• Update the runbook with anything you learned