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.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a group of scientist mice built a mega-computer named “Deep Thought” to Answer “The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” After 7.5 million years, the machine produced “42.” At PagerDuty, we did something similar, except we didn’t have scientist mice or wait 7.5 million years.
If you’ve ever been on call, you know that the incidents don’t stop because you have the flu. Or when you’re attending your child’s high school graduation. Or, as I found out firsthand, even when you’re at your own wedding. Confucius once said, “If you have never had a major occasion happen while you are on call, then you may not have ever lived.” (Okay, I totally made that one up.)
