I've noticed that while many teams track incident and system health effectively, they're often not paying attention to how on-call duties can take a toll on their members over time. I wonder if teams actually have a way of measuring whether their on-call situation is improving or worsening? Does it usually remain unnoticed until someone expresses that they're burnt out?
5 Answers
It's tough because this is something teams often realize too late. There are some key indicators to watch, like how many pages your team gets per shift, alert interruptions during sleep, or frequent non-actionable pages. We even designed our tool, Vibe OnCall, to help track these factors because you can’t have system health without considering on-call health.
Most teams don’t really have a solid way to measure on-call health intentionally. There's a fear for managers about being held accountable for their team’s well-being, especially if it impacts bonuses or job security. It might be better if companies used a shift rotation system instead of on-call duty altogether to ensure a better work-life balance.
From my experience at a big tech company, one easy metric we've used is counting the number of pager events or tickets a team gets each week. Some teams see less than one in a week, while others can get over ten! We call this 'keeping the lights on' (KTLO).
I can't even imagine how stressful it must be for someone to feel burnt out just from on-call duties. In my experience, if someone is up all night dealing with issues, they usually get to take the next day off without the usual stress, which helps a ton.
I always make sure to voice when I’m feeling burnt out; my team encourages it. Open communication helps a lot, so if you're feeling overwhelmed, just let them know!
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