Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For engineering organizations running on PagerDuty, on-call schedules are sacred. When P0 incidents happen, you need your best engineers focused and ready, not getting scheduled to conduct an interview they’ll have to decline. For years, recruiting teams have been playing a manual game of Tetris, cross-referencing on-call rotations against interviewer availability every single time they book a technical screen or panel.

ITIL 5 launched in January 2026, and for the first time in the framework's 40-year history, AI governance is front and center. If you're running incident management, on-call rotations, or building operational tooling, this matters: the gap between AI adoption and AI governance is about to become a compliance and operational risk issue. I’m not usually a big ITIL fan, but this guidance has some genuinely useful framing and questions.

An on-call responder is the first line of defence when something breaks. They assess the situation and take appropriate action. This guide walks you through what that actually looks like. You’ll see how on-call responders think through an incident and figure out what needs to be done.

There usually isn’t a hard and fast rule about who should be on-call. Teams often look for criteria like seniority, experience, or expertise. While those factors certainly help, they might matter less than you think. It is often more useful to look at whether your processes are ready. When incident responses rely on memory and intuition rather than documentation, even experienced engineers can struggle. They might handle things through internal knowledge that isn’t available to everyone else.

In the previous post, we looked at what happens after detection; when incidents stop being purely technical problems and become human ones, with cognitive load as the real constraint. This post assumes that context. The question here is simpler and more practical. What actually helps teams think clearly and act well once things are already going wrong? One answer, used quietly but consistently by high-performing teams, is the checklist.

Event Intelligence Solutions are redefining how organizations manage complexity and risk across digital ecosystems. Their true power lies not only in detecting anomalies or suppressing noise, but in providing actionable, explainable intelligence that connects IT events to business impact.

They fail because human response breaks down under pressure. Over the past decade, organizations have invested heavily in monitoring, observability, and automation. Dashboards are everywhere. Alerts fire instantly. Tickets are created automatically. And yet, when a critical incident happens, the outcome is often painfully familiar. Someone doesn’t respond. Escalations stall. Ownership is unclear. Waste work in following up is created. And valuable time is lost.