Alerting has come a long way from the days of paging an on-call administrator in the middle of the night, to multiple on-call teams that run and manage incident response around the clock. This is because as organizations grow and scale, responding to incidents also gets more complex and you often need more than one team to get involved to successfully resolve an incident.
The idea behind an escalation matrix is simple: the situation requires greater authority to resolve. Authority can take many forms, including experience with a particular toolset or simply the proper permissions to flip the right switches. Therefore, escalation must involve putting the proper information into the right person’s hands (well, device).
Have you heard about OnPage’s new and exciting integration with Amion? Through this collaboration, healthcare organizations can improve clinical communications, resulting in better patient care. It’s a sure way to enhance the patient experience, ensuring that qualified, on-call physicians respond more effectively to urgent clinical matters (i.e., patient needs). So, how exactly does the integration work?
I’m Honeycomb’s newest engineer, now on my eighth week at Honeycomb. Excitingly, I did my first week of oncall two weeks ago! Almost every engineer at Honeycomb participates in oncall, and I chose to join in the tradition. This may seem unconventional for a Developer Advocate — surely my time might be better spent holding more meetings with customers and giving more talks? Yet, I found that being oncall was the right decision for me.
On-call shadowing is an essential practice at PagerDuty. For a new engineer, a shadowing period serves as a kinder, smoother ramp-up to going on-call, with none of the stress or responsibility for diagnosing and fixing the issue. When we configure shadowing in PagerDuty, our goal is to simulate the process and actions of going on call as precisely as we can while making sure that actions of the “Shadow User” do not affect the primary engineer who is actually on call.
National Health Service’s (NHS) recent announcement on the ban of the pager represents great news for U.K. healthcare organizations and their practitioners. The ban not only represents a transformative move, it also showcases pagers’ lackluster performance in providing secure, clinical communications. Now that pagers are making their way out of U.K.
Whether you’re a seasoned IT veteran or an up-and-coming rookie in the field, it’s key that IT teams understand how to develop the most effective processes and plans for on-call schedules and rotations. Let’s take a look at some best practices that IT pros can use to become all-stars on their on-call teams.
I’ve never been on-call, but I’ve been on-call adjacent for a lot of my adult life—my partners, my housemates, my friends…they’ve largely been sysadmins, in Operations, or Dev/Ops, which means I’ve experienced a lot of the pain second-hand.
What do VHS players and Tamagotchis have in common with the pager? It’s simple, they’re old pieces of technology that were popular in the ‘90s. It’s no longer the “Saved by the Bell” years and doctors need to get with the times by ditching their hammer pants, fanny packs … and pagers! By saying goodbye to the pager, doctors can adopt a more secure, clinical communications solution that’s equipped to handle all 21st century hospital demands.
