First on-call rotation starts in three weeks and I'm quietly dreading it
Not the technical part, weirdly. It's the phone going off at 3am and me being the person who's meant to know what to do.
I've shadowed two rotations and both were completely dead, which somehow made it worse. I've still never watched anyone handle a real page.
For those who've done it: what actually helped the first time round? Stuff I should be reading now, or is it mostly just surviving one bad night and finding out you don't die?
2 comments
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AnonymousAnon Read the runbooks, sure, but the more useful thing is to actually run one while nothing is on fire. Half the ones I inherited had a command that had drifted or a dashboard link that 404'd, and you really don't want to discover that at 3am with a page open. Fixing two of them beforehand was the best prep I did.
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AnonymousAnon The thing nobody told me: on your first rotation your job isn't to fix it. It's to acknowledge, work out whether it's actually user-facing, and escalate if it is. Escalating at 3am is a correct outcome, not a failure. I spent my first two pages feeling like waking someone up was cheating.