Structuring an On-Call Rotation: A Guide for Engineering Managers

On-call rotations are more than “who picks up the phone”—they’re a critical way to balance incident response, customer support, and operational health without burning out your team. Below is a template you can adapt, illustrated with examples from my time leading a device-management on-call rotation at a fast-growing tech company.

1. Define a Clear Primary On-Call Role

Rather than vague “points,” be explicit about the time commitment you expect each engineer to spend on-call:

Tip: Survey your team to agree on a realistic hours-per-week target before finalizing the rotation schedule.

2. Onboarding (2-Week Pairing)

1. Week 1: Shadow
   • New on-call owner watches the current engineer handle live incidents, support tickets, and handoffs.
2. Week 2: Reverse Shadow
   • New owner takes the lead; outgoing engineer observes and provides real-time feedback.

This structured pairing ensures tribal knowledge—playbooks, alert-noise patterns, escalation paths—transfers quickly.

3. Primary On-Call Responsibilities

3.1 Incident Response & Command

• Triage Alerts in your monitoring system (e.g. Datadog, Prometheus) and designated “alerts” channel.
• Act as Incident Commander until a senior engineer arrives to lead the war room.

3.2 Customer & Sales Support

• Monitor the support-ticket queue (Zendesk, Jira Service Desk, Intercom).
• Acknowledge new tickets within your SLA (e.g. within 2 hours).
• Resolve or escalate within a defined window (e.g. 5 days), and close tickets with no customer response after a set period (e.g. 5 days).

3.3 Daily System Health Check

• At a fixed time each day (e.g. 11 AM), review core dashboards:
  • Error rates, API latency, backlog metrics
  • Resource-utilization (CPU, memory, agent heartbeats)
• Investigate anomalies immediately to prevent cascading failures.

3.4 Stand-Up & Weekly Handoff

• Daily stand-up: report open incidents, ticket trends, and blockers.
• Weekly handoff document: cover
  • Trend analysis (incidents vs. prior week)
  • Outstanding action items
  • Volume metrics (tickets opened vs. closed)

3.5 Maintain Runbooks & Playbooks

• Centralize all instructions in a wiki or docs repo:
  • On-call checklist (monitor links, escalation contacts)
  • Playbooks for common failure scenarios
  • Postmortem and incident-review templates

4. Tooling & Communication Best Practices

• Collaboration Channels

  • Separate channels for support, alerts, and feature questions.
  • Use group pings (e.g. @oncall-primary) to reach the right person instantly.

• Monitoring & Dashboards

  • Provide direct links to real-time dashboards and notebooks.
  • Automate alert thresholds to open or escalate tickets automatically.

• Ticketing System SLAs

  • Enforce and track SLAs with reminders and escalation rules.
  • Regularly review ticket aging and backlog trends.

5. Continuous Improvement

• Load Balancing

  • Rotate evenly—aim for a “1 in N” schedule so no one is on-call too frequently.

• Noise Reduction

  • Hold quarterly on-call retrospectives to prune or tune noisy alerts.

• Automation

  • Replace repetitive daily checks with scheduled reports or scripts when possible.

• Recognition & Feedback

  • Credit engineers for on-call improvements in your sprint retros and performance reviews.

In Summary

A well-structured on-call program hinges on clear time commitments, paired onboarding, defined responsibilities, and robust tooling. Use these guidelines as a starting point, then iterate based on your product’s unique failure modes and your organization’s culture. By doing so, you’ll foster a resilient support framework that scales with your team—and keeps everyone sane.