What you absolutely must know when responding to an incident is what kind of impact it has on customers and how negatively it can affect your team. This is typically addressed by following some kind of incident classification, usually “incident severity levels”, to indicate the importance of every incident - that is, to understand how seriously various stakeholders are affected and to route the incident differently if necessary.

It shouldn’t take you more time than a few seconds to understand your on-call schedule and rotations and how you could make changes to it. It is important for on-call scheduling and alerting tools to make this as simple as possible. If you’re spending more than a few seconds to understand what your on-call rotations are going to be like for the next day or week or month, then you need to start looking for a better on-call management tool.