On-Call Rotation Cadence

Purpose: Define on-call rotation schedules, escalation contacts, and standby processes. Move from "call the person who works last" to structured rotation.

Rotation Structure

Rotation Schedule

SRE / Infrastructure Rotation (4 weeks)

Senior Engineering Rotation (4 weeks)

C-Level Rotation (1 month)

On-Call Responsibilities

Tier 1: SRE / Infrastructure On-Call

• Primary duty: Respond to Tier 1 alerts within 15 min
• Investigate SLO breaches: Check logs, metrics, infrastructure status
• Communicate to Tier 2: Escalate if unresolved in 15 min
• Update incident timeline: Every 15 min
• Post-updates to Slack: #incident-sre

Tier 2: Senior Engineering On-Call

• Primary duty: Resolve Tier 2 incidents within 30 min
• Assess business impact: What does this mean for customers?
• Allocate resources: Assign devs, QA, design
• Communicate to Tier 3: Escalate if unresolved in 30 min
• Update incident timeline: Every 30 min

Tier 3: C-Level On-Call

• Primary duty: Make major decisions for Tier 3 incidents
• Authorize resources: People, budget, customer comms
• Finalize incident plan: What will we do? How do we communicate?
• Communicate to Tier 4: Hand off after 1 hour or resolution
• Document incident: Review RCA, ensure lessons learned

Tier 4: Operations Manager On-Call

• Primary duty: Monitor Tier 4 incidents after 1 hour
• Complete RCA: Root cause analysis, prevention
• Close incident: Finalize post-mortem, lessons learned
• Track recurrence: Similar incidents in last 30 days?
• Share with team: Weekly ops sync

Standby Process

Backup On-Call

• No duty: Only activated if primary fails to respond
• Monitoring: No alerts, just standby
• Notifications: Only escalated to primary
• Documentation: Log standby time for compensation

Standby Period (4 weeks)

• Primary active: Always monitoring
• Backup standby: No alert monitoring
• Emergency contact: PagerDuty escalation path
• Backup duty activated: Only if primary fails to respond after 15 min

Handoff Process

1. Primary pulls incident timeline for last incident 2. Primary posts handoff message in channel 3. Backup confirms receipt within 30 min 4. Backup links incident timeline in channel 5. Primary archives incident from active channel 6. Documentation shared: Handoff notes, incident timeline

Escalation Contacts

PagerDuty Integrations

Tier 1 Escalation:

• Primary: PagerDuty P1 → @sre-lead-01
• Backup: PagerDuty P2 → @sre-lead-02
• Auto-escalate: If no response after 15 min → @senior-lead-01

Tier 2 Escalation:

• Primary: PagerDuty P2 → @senior-lead-01
• Backup: PagerDuty P3 → @senior-lead-02
• Auto-escalate: If no response after 30 min → @cto-lead

Tier 3 Escalation:

• Primary: PagerDuty P3 → @cto-lead
• Backup: PagerDuty P4 → @vp-engineering
• Auto-escalate: If no response after 1 hour → PagerDuty VIP alert

Incident Rotation Workflow

Step 1: New Incident

1. Alert fires → primary on-call notified 2. Primary acks → backup notified of escalation path 3. Primary investigates → updates incident timeline 4. Primary communicates → posts updates to Slack

Step 2: Incident Escalation

1. No response after X min → backup activated 2. Backup takes over → links incident timeline 3. Backup communicates → posts updates to Slack 4. Primary archived → documentation preserved

Step 3: Incident Resolution

1. Primary resolves → marks incident resolved 2. Timeline updated → final status 3. Post-mortem written → linked in timeline 4. Team notified → lessons learned shared

Documentation Fields

• ☐ On-Call Tier: Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 / Tier 4
• ☐ On-Call Person: @username
• ☐ Backup On-Call: @username
• ☐ Incident ID: #123
• ☐ Rotation Week: 1-4
• ☐ Standby Hours: ____ hours
• ☐ Incident Count: [count]

Rotations and On-Call Duty

On-Call Duty Compensation

Primary On-Call (Active Duty)

• Pay rate: 1.5x normal rate for Tier 1
• Premium: 2x normal rate for Tier 3 (major incident)
• Documentation: Incident time recorded in incident timeline

Backup On-Call (Standby Duty)

• Compensation: 0.5x standby rate
• Standby time: Logged in incident timeline
• Standby criteria: No active incidents

On-Call Rotation Schedule

• Rotation length: 4 weeks (monthly rotation)
• Backup coverage: Always
• Standby period: 4 weeks between on-call cycles

Usage: Use for on-call scheduling and escalation. Document primary, backup, and escalation paths. Works with oncall-escalation-slack-structure.md for communication.

Product links: /l/ops-starter-kit-vol-2 | /l/ops-starter-kit | /l/automation-starter-pack

From the HIVE80lab kit

• The First 30 Minutes — free incident quick-start
• Ops Starter Kit — full incident-response kit for small teams — $14
• Ops Mega Bundle — all 5 kits in one download — $29
• Small-Team Ops Audit — prioritized findings + fix plan, five-day turnaround — $149
• Custom Incident Runbook — done-for-you, built from your estate, 48h — $249

Part of the five-pillar incident-response set: see the pillars overview and the blameless post-incident review template.