On-Call

What it is

On-call is a schedule where engineers take turns being reachable outside normal hours to respond to alerts, incidentsIncidentAn unplanned disruption or degradation of a service that needs an urgent response., and urgent escalations.

Why it matters

Customer escalations that page on-call engineers interrupt sleep and focus. Many of them turn out to be non-urgent or already known.

Best practices

1. Page only for real urgency – Define what counts with support.
2. Include runbooks – Each alert should link to what to do.
3. Review pages weekly – Remove noise and fix repeat causes.

How Decimal helps

Decimal investigates before anyone is paged, so on-call engineers get fewer interruptions and a head start when they do.