What's an IT On-Call Management System?

IT on-call management is the process of assigning administrators, developers, and operators to after-hours schedules so urgent issues are resolved quickly and fairly.

With OnPage, IT teams go beyond spreadsheets and SMS to:

• Automate on-call scheduling and rotations

• Deliver persistent, alert-until-read notifications that bypass silent mode

• Escalate automatically until the right responder acknowledges

• Track every alert with time-stamped audit trails

This ensures accountability across all incidents, whether they happen on weeknights, weekends, or holidays.

One of the key goals of on-call is to limit disruption to the end customer. To that end, a pageable alert is only fired when an action must be taken.

Step 1: Create a Fair On-Call Schedule

Use group schedules to make sure everyone gets a chance at bat. Rotations are key in this regard as they ensure everyone is put on-call at some point during a normal schedule.

Moreover, a fair schedule will promote the sense that no one group is being picked on or forced to work more hours than any other.

Step 2: Make Sure Alerts Are Persistent

How many times has someone on your team said they didn’t respond to an alert because they didn’t hear it?

Most alerting technologies notify engineers via SMS or email and don’t provide persistent, distinguishable alerting mechanisms if the engineer is temporarily out of range.

Instead, make sure you are using a tool that avoids these problems by creating persistent, distinguishable alerts that will rise above the clutter®.

Additionally, make sure the alerts will be heard when the engineer comes back into range.

Step 3: Messaging for Efficient Communications

Make sure the on-call communication tools you use enable communications between engineers.

That is, make sure they have the right tool which will enable both alerting and critical communications. Engineers should be able to message fellow engineers as well as groups.

Ideally, your messaging platform will also integrate with widely used industry tools such as Slack.

From Slack, for example, engineers could alert individuals to significant events that need their colleague’s input.