Its Time We Rethink On-Call Culture
summary
Research shows on-call work raises cortisol and drives burnout, so the proposal is concrete: measure alerts per on-call personnel and escalation rate, group related events (example: DDoS + high CPU), enrich alerts with service/team tags, route to the correct team, and build on-call schedules with team-defined fairness. Automate remediation and investigation (auto-remediate common faults, auto-gather dashboards), add one-click block IP actions, run monthly incident reviews, maintain runbooks and blameless postmortems, and compensate responders.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00On-call pain points
- 1:47Human and technical impacts
- 4:56Measuring on-call metrics
- 7:09Alert creation and routing
- 10:00Mapping services to teams
- 11:43Grouping alerts for incidents
- 13:09Fair on-call schedules
- 14:54Escalation policy balance
- 15:36Automating remediation
- 17:01Human-centered on-call model
- 17:24War games and postmortems
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