# What is On-Call?

> The rotation of engineers responsible for responding to urgent issues.

Canonical: https://www.decimal.app/glossary/on-call · Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

On-call is a schedule where engineers take turns being reachable outside normal hours to respond to alerts, incidents, 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.

## Related terms

- [Incident](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/incident): An unplanned disruption or degradation of a service that needs an urgent response.
- [Runbook](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/runbook): Step-by-step instructions for handling a known situation.
- [Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/mtta): The average time between an alert or ticket and someone taking ownership.
- [Escalation Path](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/escalation-path): The defined route a ticket follows when the current owner can't resolve it.

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