Overview

On-call scheduling helps engineering teams manage 24/7 incident response. Sizemotion makes it easy to create fair rotations, track on-call time, and ensure someone's always available to handle critical issues.

Why On-Call Matters

  • Reliability: Fast response to production incidents
  • Fairness: Distribute on-call burden evenly
  • Accountability: Clear ownership of incident response
  • Recognition: Track and compensate on-call time
  • Coordination: Avoid coverage gaps and confusion

Key Features

  • Rotation management: Weekly, daily, or custom cycles
  • Team schedules: Multiple teams, multiple rotations
  • Swap requests: Easy shift trading
  • Override functionality: Temporary schedule changes
  • Notifications: Upcoming shift reminders
  • Incident logging: Track pages and response times

Setting Up On-Call Rotations

Step 1: Create a Rotation

  1. Go to On-Call > Schedules
  2. Click "Create Rotation"
  3. Name your rotation (e.g., "Backend Primary", "Frontend On-Call")
  4. Select the team
  5. Choose rotation type:
    • Weekly: Monday-Monday rotation (most common)
    • Daily: 24-hour shifts
    • Custom: Set your own schedule
  6. Set rotation start date

Step 2: Add Team Members

  1. Select who's in the rotation
  2. Drag to reorder the rotation sequence
  3. Set any exclusions (people who shouldn't be on-call)
  4. Configure handoff time (e.g., Monday 9 AM)

Step 3: Configure Tiers (Optional)

For larger teams, use multi-tier escalation:

  • Primary: First responder
  • Secondary: Backup if primary doesn't respond
  • Tertiary: Manager or senior engineer

Step 4: Set Notification Rules

  1. Choose how engineers are notified:
    • Email
    • SMS
    • Push notification
    • Phone call (for critical alerts)
  2. Set escalation timeouts (e.g., escalate after 5 minutes of no response)
  3. Configure shift reminders (24 hours and 1 hour before shift starts)

Managing Schedules

Viewing the Schedule

The on-call calendar shows:

  • Current on-call: Who's on duty right now
  • Upcoming shifts: Next 4-8 weeks
  • Past coverage: Historical rotation data
  • Multiple rotations: View all team rotations at once
  • Coverage gaps: Highlighted if rotation is incomplete

Swapping Shifts

  1. Click on your assigned shift
  2. Select "Request Swap"
  3. Choose who you want to swap with
  4. They receive a notification
  5. If approved, schedule updates automatically

Overrides

For one-time changes (vacation, sick day):

  1. Click on the shift to override
  2. Select "Add Override"
  3. Choose replacement engineer
  4. Set date/time range
  5. Add reason (optional)
  6. Save—schedule updates and notifications sent

Time Off & Exclusions

  1. Go to On-Call > Settings
  2. Add time-off dates for team members
  3. System automatically skips them in rotation
  4. Next person in rotation is scheduled instead

Incident Tracking

Logging an Incident

When an incident occurs:

  1. Go to On-Call > Incidents
  2. Click "Log Incident"
  3. Enter details:
    • Severity (P0, P1, P2, P3)
    • System affected
    • Time detected
    • Who responded
  4. Document timeline and actions taken
  5. Mark as resolved when fixed

Incident Severity Levels

  • P0 (Critical): Total outage, all users affected
  • P1 (High): Major feature broken, significant user impact
  • P2 (Medium): Partial degradation, some users affected
  • P3 (Low): Minor issue, workaround available

Post-Incident Review

After major incidents:

  1. Schedule blameless postmortem
  2. Document what happened
  3. Identify root cause
  4. Create action items
  5. Track follow-up in Sizemotion

On-Call Metrics

Track team health with:

  • Incident count: Total incidents per week/month
  • Response time: How quickly incidents are acknowledged
  • Resolution time: Time to fix (MTTR)
  • Paging frequency: How often on-call is paged
  • Sleep disruption: Pages during off-hours
  • False alarms: Pages that weren't real incidents

Best Practices

🔄 Rotation Design

  • Fair distribution: Everyone takes turns, no permanent on-call
  • Reasonable shift length: 1 week is common, not longer than 2 weeks
  • Minimum team size: At least 4-5 people to avoid burnout
  • Handoff documentation: Notes for next person on-call
  • Avoid weekends: Or rotate weekends separately if needed

📱 Notifications

  • Multiple channels: Start with Slack, escalate to SMS/call
  • Clear escalation: Define timeouts (5 min → secondary, 10 min → manager)
  • Actionable alerts: Include runbooks or context in pages
  • Reduce noise: Fix false alarms and flaky alerts
  • Test regularly: Verify on-call gets notifications

🏥 Preventing Burnout

  • Compensate fairly: On-call pay or time off in lieu
  • Monitor load: Track pages per shift, flag if too high
  • Rotation breaks: Skip someone if they had brutal week
  • Improve systems: Reduce incidents through better monitoring/testing
  • Respect boundaries: Don't page for non-urgent issues at 3 AM

💡 Pro Tips

  • Handoff meetings: 15-minute sync at rotation change
  • Runbook links: Include in all alerts
  • Shadow shifts: New engineers shadow before going solo
  • Blameless culture: Focus on systems, not people
  • Track in 1:1s: Discuss on-call experience with manager
  • Celebrate improvements: Recognize reduced incident rates

🚨 Warning Signs

Watch for signs of unsustainable on-call:

  • Consistent pages during sleep hours (11 PM - 7 AM)
  • More than 2-3 incidents per shift
  • Same issues repeating (not fixing root causes)
  • Team members requesting to skip rotation
  • High turnover on teams with on-call
  • Incidents taking >2 hours to resolve regularly

On-Call Compensation

Common Models

  • Flat stipend: $X per week on-call (e.g., $500/week)
  • Per-incident: $Y per page (e.g., $100/incident)
  • Time-based: Hourly rate for time spent responding
  • Comp time: Time off after busy on-call week
  • Hybrid: Base stipend + per-incident bonus

Tracking Compensation in Sizemotion

  1. System automatically logs on-call hours
  2. Track incidents per engineer
  3. Export reports for payroll
  4. Review fairness quarterly

Integrations

Alerting Tools

Connect Sizemotion to:

  • PagerDuty: Sync schedules and incidents
  • Opsgenie: Alert routing and escalation
  • VictorOps (Splunk): Incident management
  • Datadog: Monitoring alerts
  • Slack: Notifications and incident channels

Calendar Sync

Sync on-call schedule to:

  • Google Calendar
  • Outlook Calendar
  • iCal

Example Rotation Setups

Small Team (4-6 Engineers)

  • Rotation: Weekly, Monday-Monday
  • Tiers: Single tier (everyone primary)
  • Escalation: Skip to manager after 10 minutes
  • Compensation: $300/week stipend

Medium Team (10-15 Engineers)

  • Rotation: Weekly primary, monthly secondary
  • Tiers: Primary + Secondary
  • Escalation: Primary → Secondary (5 min) → Manager (10 min)
  • Compensation: $500/week primary, $200/week secondary

Large Team (20+ Engineers)

  • Rotation: Multiple parallel rotations by service area
  • Tiers: Primary + Secondary + Manager
  • Follow-the-sun: Handoff between time zones
  • Compensation: Stipend + per-incident bonus

Next Steps