What's an IT On-Call Management System?

An IT on-call management system streamlines the process of adding IT administrators, developers, security operators, or other members of the engineering staff into after-hours or weekend call schedules, assigning them equitable responsibility for managing IT alerts outside of traditional work hours.

Team members are placed into on-call rotations or schedules, and respond to priority outages or disruptions of important technologies. With multiple staff members handling on-call duties, management becomes much easier with effective processes supported by automation.

Effective after-hour policies ensure that individuals share the burden equally in responding to critical incidents that occur on weekends, weeknights and 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.

Discover how to improve after-hours processes to achieve key performance goals while also fostering work-life balance. The “How to Survive Being On-Call” white paper highlights:

• The processes that need to be estbalished before an incident occurs
• The best way to organize your team
• Automation that leads to better workflow

To get your free copy of our white paper, please fill out the form below.