In this ignite talk we discuss how to use Roleplaying to make your on-call process a bit more humane.

1. Make On-Call More
Humane...and
Human.

2. The success or
failure of your
Oncall scenario
depends on you!

3. We need a new way of thinking about on-
call!

7. Alerts that have
no action!

9. You get a page with no specific
data

10. You get paged for stuff you can't
handle

11. You get paged for a constantly
flapping alert

12. Ask Yourself These Questions
• Who
• What
• When
• Where
• Why

13. Who should be getting this page
• Am I the best person to handle it?
• Am I empowered to handle it?

14. What is paging me?
• Can I tell if it's an instance or a service that's in trouble?
• Can I identify the specific details of that instance or service

15. When did the error get detected?
• Is this a past-tense alert or a current persistent problem?
• Is it worth paging me now?

16. Where did this error happen?
• Production? Staging? Build Pipeline?
• What datacenter?

17. Why is it paging me?
• Don't assume the alert speaks for itself
• Describe the potential impact
• Describe why this alert is significant

18. Remember you're interrupting
people's lives!

19. Don't Default to Paging!
• Ask yourself "Do I really give a shit that this happens?"
• Use E-mail/Slack first
• Ask yourself why should I interrupt someone for this?
• If you're going to interrupt someone, be sure you tell them
in the page why its so important.

20. Recap
• Envision someone that drives you crazy
• Pretend all the pages are coming from this person
• Ask what the page is telling me
• If you can still make an annoying snappy comeback, you
probably need more data