How do you ensure a healthy on-call experience?
In this post, you’ll learn:
Tips for teams and engineering leaders to improve on-call hygiene
Examples of companies with effective on-call approaches
Identify Issues Weekly
The first step to a healthy on-call is to identify issues and ensure a strong signal-to-noise ratio regularly. On-call hygiene is not a one-time fix, but an ongoing process. Set up a weekly review to analyze alerts and determine which ones are providing valuable signals vs. just noise. Ruthlessly eliminate noisy alerts that don’t require immediate attention. A japan whatsapp number data common example of this could be noisy alerts when the overall system is healthy but has a small blip in metrics that recovers automatically. In such cases, it’s important to identify the root cause and address it immediately rather than letting it alert and divert developer attention frequently.
Prioritize Repeat Offenders
Alerts that fire repeatedly demand special attention. If not addressed, these problems snowball and lead to even more alerts in the future. Prioritize fixing these repeat offenders to get ahead of the alert fatigue curve.
De-Duplicate and Group Related Alerts
During a major incident, the last thing you want is developers being paged hundreds of times for the same underlying issue. Work to de-duplicate related alerts to a single notification. This will help your team stay focused on the actual problem rather than getting buried in redundant pages. As an example, instead of having error rate alerts on every host or server, see if an aggregate higher-level alert can provide the same level of reliability and detection capabilities; then, aggregation will help improve overall sanity. This single alert provides a clear signal that there’s an application-wide problem, without overwhelming the on-call engineer with noise.