Building a healthy on-call culture
summary
Study with 133 participants, increased cortisol shows on-call causes stress even with few pages; a data-center outage example costs $800 per minute outage so availability is a business need. The checklist is concrete: six must-haves — shadowing and runbooks, clear escalation paths, fair schedules and follow-the-sun where possible, developers owning services, SLO-driven actionable alerts, chaos testing and postmortems with metrics. Practicals include onboarding via shadow shifts, routing alerts to owners, one-day time-off incentives after on-call weeks, and keeping runbooks and dashboards attached to alerts.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Start
- 5:15Be transparent
- 7:50Share responsibilities
- 11:45Be prepared
- 13:40Build resilient and 4. sustainable systems
- 15:18Apply Chaos Engineering Principles
- 16:02Create actionable alerts
- 18:19experiences
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