Ensuring the reliability and availability of software systems is crucial for businesses that rely on technology to deliver their services. From e-commerce platforms to cloud-based infrastructures, minimizing downtime and responding quickly to incidents is essential. This is where on-call frameworks come in.

On-call frameworks are designed to distribute the responsibility of incident response across engineering teams, ensuring that production issues are promptly detected and addressed. These frameworks typically assign engineers to on-call rotations, allowing them to monitor and handle incidents outside of regular business hours. By assigning these duties on a rotating basis, organizations ensure that there is always someone available to maintain system uptime and performance.

The on-call software engineer is central to this process. These engineers serve as the first line of defense, responding to alerts, diagnosing issues, and coordinating incident resolution. Their role extends beyond just troubleshooting; they help maintain overall system stability and ensure that potential problems are resolved before they can impact users. Whether handling urgent outages or addressing smaller issues, on-call engineers play a critical role in maintaining the reliability of modern software systems.

This blog will explore the life of an on-call software engineer, their responsibilities, the challenges they face, and how tools and automation are making their workflows more efficient.

On-call engineers play a crucial role in ensuring system reliability and incident resolution. Their day-to-day tasks can vary widely depending on the nature of the incidents, but several common aspects define their responsibilities during an on-call shift.

Below is a breakdown of these key points:

On-Call Duration

• On-call engineers typically rotate shifts that last 1-2 weeks, depending on the size of the team and the organization’s requirements.
• These rotations ensure that the responsibility of incident response is distributed across the team, preventing burnout.

Time Allocation

• During their on-call period, engineers allocate about 30-40% of their work bandwidth to on-call responsibilities.
• On-call duties take priority over regular project tasks, ensuring that critical incidents are addressed immediately to minimize downtime.

Handling Alerts

• Engineers receive alerts from a variety of sources, including customer reports, business teams, and automated monitoring tools like Slack, PagerDuty, or OpsGenie.
• Mature teams often convert these alerts into tickets to improve visibility, facilitate collaboration, and track the status of ongoing issues.

Acknowledging and Verifying Alerts

• The on-call engineer’s first task is to acknowledge the alert and verify the reported issue.
• They perform diagnostics, such as checking logs and metrics, to confirm the problem and assess its severity.

Diagnosing the Issue

• After verifying the issue, the engineer works to diagnose the root cause.
• If their team’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) outline a resolution, they follow the steps to resolve the issue.
• If the problem is beyond their scope or not covered by SOPs, they escalate it to the relevant team for further handling.

Escalation Process

• Many teams have a structured escalation process involving primary and secondary on-call engineers.
• If the primary engineer fails to acknowledge the alert within a specific timeframe, the issue is escalated to the secondary engineer.
• The escalation matrix may continue up to higher-level engineers or management, depending on the severity of the incident.

End-to-End Ownership

• The on-call engineer remains responsible for the issue until it is fully resolved.
• Once resolved, they update the ticket, inform relevant stakeholders, and ensure all necessary follow-up actions are completed.

Post-Incident Responsibilities

• On-call engineers are often required to document the incident, creating Root Cause Analysis (RCA) reports.
• Because they have the most context regarding the incident, their RCA documentation is crucial for preventing similar issues in the future and improving overall system resilience.

By breaking down the on-call engineer's life into these key responsibilities, it's clear that their role goes beyond just reacting to problems. It involves a systematic approach to incident management, problem-solving, and post-incident learning, ensuring that systems remain stable and reliable even in the face of unexpected issues.

On-call engineers play a critical role in maintaining system reliability, but the job comes with its own set of challenges. These can affect not only their performance but also their well-being.

Below are some of the common challenges faced by on-call engineers:

Alert Fatigue

One of the biggest challenges is dealing with a high volume of alerts. Engineers may receive frequent notifications, many of which can be false positives or non-critical issues.

This constant barrage of notifications can lead to alert fatigue, where engineers become desensitized to alerts and may overlook critical issues. It also diminishes their productivity and focus.

Disruptions to Sleep and Personal Time

Being on-call often means engineers can be woken up at odd hours to address incidents. These interruptions, especially at night or during weekends, can severely affect their personal time and rest.

Repeated sleep disruptions lead to exhaustion, reduced mental clarity, and decreased efficiency in handling incidents. Over time, this can also take a toll on their overall health and work-life balance.

Balancing On-Call Duties with Project Work

On-call responsibilities often overlap with the engineer’s regular project work. Since on-call tasks take precedence, managing both can be difficult.

Engineers might struggle to balance their on-call duties with their sprint goals or ongoing projects, leading to delays or incomplete tasks. This also adds extra stress, especially when tight project deadlines loom.

Mental and Physical Stress

Handling high-pressure situations, especially during critical system outages or urgent incidents, can cause significant mental and physical stress.

The intense pressure to resolve issues quickly, combined with the urgency of some incidents, can lead to burnout. Over time, this constant stress may reduce job satisfaction and the ability to perform effectively.

These challenges highlight the demanding nature of the on-call engineer’s role. Organizations need to be mindful of these factors, implementing solutions like automation, better alert management, and fair on-call rotation schedules to minimize the strain on their engineers.

To handle the unpredictable and often stressful nature of on-call duties, teams can adopt several best practices to enhance their effectiveness and reduce the strain on engineers.

Here are some key strategies for ensuring smooth and successful on-call operations:

Effective Communication During Incidents

Clear and timely communication is crucial when resolving incidents, especially when multiple team members or stakeholders are involved.

Use a dedicated communication channel, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, for incident discussions to keep everyone updated. Ensure that all relevant stakeholders are promptly informed about the status of the issue and any necessary next steps.

Effective communication reduces confusion and ensures that everyone involved is on the same page, leading to faster resolutions and smoother handoffs during escalations.

Clear Documentation and Record-Keeping

Keeping accurate records of incidents, resolutions, and Root Cause Analyses (RCA) is essential for future reference and process improvement.

Maintain detailed incident logs and ensure that every alert and response is well-documented in a centralized ticketing system. This makes it easier to track patterns, review incidents, and create RCA documents later.

Thorough documentation improves team learning, prevents future incidents, and provides valuable insights for postmortems and process optimization.

Preparing Mentally for High-Stress Situations

On-call engineers often face high-pressure situations, particularly when resolving critical incidents that impact business operations.

Engineers should adopt mental strategies such as staying calm under pressure, breaking down complex problems into smaller tasks, and following Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to avoid panic.

Mental preparation and resilience help engineers remain focused during stressful incidents, enabling them to manage critical situations more effectively and avoid burnout.

Team Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing

On-call teams are more effective when they collaborate and share knowledge about recurring issues, systems behavior, and best practices for incident management.

Encourage regular knowledge-sharing sessions where team members discuss incidents, resolutions, and potential improvements to workflows. Utilize runbooks to ensure that all engineers have access to standardized procedures.

Collaboration fosters a culture of continuous improvement and makes it easier for engineers to troubleshoot incidents efficiently by leveraging shared expertise and documented processes.

By following these best practices, on-call teams can improve their ability to respond to incidents, reduce the strain on individual engineers, and create a more efficient, resilient on-call system.

As on-call engineering has matured, the support stack has levelled-up too. Noise-taming rules, AI-driven investigations and one-click runbooks—now built into Doctor Droid—are reshaping the incident-response playbook. The result: faster fixes with far less manual thrash.

Runbooks: Step-by-Step Help at 3 A.M.

Runbooks are pre-written, step-by-step procedures drafted by senior engineers. When an alert fires, the on-call simply opens the matching runbook and follows crisp instructions—no frantic Slack pings, no guess-and-check.

• Doctor Droid Runbooks ship with ready-made diagnostic and remediation flows (restart pods, scale a deployment, clear a cache) and let you add your own with YAML-simple syntax.
• Built-in audit trails record every command and outcome, so post-mortems write themselves.

Doctor Droid Automation: From Alert to Action

1. Noise Rules Engine - Filter false positives and auto-group related signals into a single, actionable incident.
2. AI Investigations - Doctor Droid digs through logs, metrics and traces, surfacing the likely root cause before you even open the dashboard.
3. Instant Remediation - Kick off a runbook right inside the incident view—restart pods, scale resources, run SQL patches—no context-switching.
4. People & Service Catalogs - Escalations follow your on-call rotation automatically, while dependency maps reveal upstream/downstream blast radius in one click.

These automations strip away manual data-gathering, shrink MTTR and let engineers focus on solving rather than searching.

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To ensure that on-call practices are efficient and impactful, it's important to measure and evaluate performance through key metrics. These metrics help teams understand how effectively incidents are being handled, identify areas for improvement, and ensure continuous optimization of the on-call process. Below are some crucial metrics to track when assessing on-call effectiveness:

Key Metrics to Measure On-Call Effectiveness

• Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA):

This metric measures the average time it takes for an on-call engineer to acknowledge an alert after it’s raised. A low MTTA indicates that alerts are being responded to quickly, minimizing the risk of incidents escalating.

Faster acknowledgment ensures that issues are addressed before they worsen, improving overall system reliability.

• Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR):

MTTR tracks the average time it takes to fully resolve an incident, from the moment the alert is acknowledged to its final resolution. Lower MTTR indicates efficient problem-solving and swift recovery.

Reducing MTTR minimizes downtime and ensures that system disruptions have a minimal impact on users or customers.

• Incident Volume:

This metric refers to the total number of incidents or alerts that are triggered within a specific period. Monitoring incident volume helps teams identify trends, such as recurring issues or specific times when incidents tend to occur more frequently.

High incident volume may indicate underlying system health issues or poor alert configurations, both of which need addressing.

• Escalation Rates:

Escalation rates measure how often incidents are passed on from the first responder to a secondary or higher-level team member. High escalation rates may indicate that on-call engineers are facing issues beyond their scope.

If escalation rates are consistently high, it may be a sign that additional training, better SOPs, or more automation is needed to help first responders manage incidents more effectively.

Regularly tracking these metrics provides valuable insights into how well the on-call process is functioning. Teams can use this data to pinpoint bottlenecks, improve their workflows, and refine their response strategies.