What Are the Expected Response Times When You’re On Call?

Most teams use an alerting service that calls or pages your phone directly. If you don’t acknowledge the alert, it automatically escalates to the secondary on-call person, then possibly to a team lead or manager. That escalation process is there to prevent one missed page from becoming a larger outage. Repeatedly missing alerts will usually lead to a performance or reliability discussion.

The exact expectations should be agreed on in advance and usually depend on how critical the system is. A common setup is acknowledging an alert within 5–15 minutes, while the time to begin remediation might be anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. Resolution time is much harder to define because it depends on the incident. If you’re briefly unavailable, you may be able to acknowledge the page from your phone and start investigating as soon as you can, but you should generally remain within easy reach of your laptop and reliable internet.