Human Load Balancing: Creative Strategies for Managing On-Call

Some stuff we've seen about what works— and doesn't — talking to customers at PagerDuty.

Transcript

1. @dshack Human Load Balancing Creative Strategies for Managing On-Call
2. @dshack PagerDuty 6 years in the business 1,000s of customers around the world 10,000s of schedules, some crazier than others
3. @dshack On-Call Human(s) Problem
4. @dshack Optimizing On-Call Effective Response Low Switching Costs Sustainable
5. @dshack Rotations
6. @dshack Weekly (or biweekly) Rotation S M T W Th F Sa A B C D
7. @dshack Weekday/Weekend S M T W Th F Sa C A D D B A A C B B D C
8. @dshack Monthly A B C Jan Feb Mar
9. @dshack Daily S M T W Th F Sa A B C D A B C D A B C D A B
10. @dshack Hourly? 8am-10am A 10am-12pm B 12pm-2pm C 2pm-4pm D 4pm-6pm E
11. @dshack Follow-the-sun 8am-4pm UTC-8 8am-4pm UTC+0 8am-4pm UTC+8
12. @dshack Dynamic Routing
13. @dshack Round Robin A B C
14. @dshack Race to the pager
15. @dshack Deploy-driven
16. @dshack Pro Tips
17. @dshack Ritualize handoff Midweek is best Write down significant events Secondaries before or after primaries in rotations
18. @dshack Empower responders to fix shit On-call? Work on issues that affect on-call Concentrate interrupts on on-call person to help the rest of the team achieve flow
19. @dshack Page-Measure-Learn Figure out what’s working and what doesn’t Try new stuff Keep improving!
20. @dshack Happy On-Calling!