Scope of the rotation
- Which services, alerts, and business hours are covered
- Primary vs. secondary responsibilities
- Explicit escalation paths — including 'wake the manager'
Load and compensation
Target pages per rotation. If it's exceeding that, fix the alerts before you fix the schedule. Compensation model — comp days, on-call pay, or both — written down.
Handoff ritual
Every rotation ends with a written handoff: open incidents, alerts to watch, changes to context. 10 minutes of writing saves a night of confusion.
Feedback loop
Monthly review of every page: was it actionable? Was it in-hours or off-hours? Kill alerts that don't earn their weight.
Common pitfalls
- — Primary-only rotations. One person going on holiday breaks the whole system.
- — Ignoring off-hours pages in metrics. Off-hours is where burnout lives.
- — Never touching the alert set. Every quiet alert is technical debt.