On-Call Rotation
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
On-Call Rotation is a schedule where team members take turns being the person who gets woken up when production breaks. This week it's Alice, next week it's Bob. It spreads the 3 AM misery fairly across the team. Nobody likes it, but everybody needs it.
Real Talk
On-call rotation is a scheduling practice where team members take turns as the primary responder for production incidents. Rotations are managed in tools like PagerDuty or Opsgenie with configurable schedules (daily, weekly), override capabilities, and timezone-aware shift handoffs.
When You'll Hear This
"Our on-call rotation is weekly — each engineer does one week per month." / "You can swap on-call shifts in PagerDuty if something comes up."
Related Terms
Alert Routing
Alert Routing decides which alerts go to which people through which channels. Database down? Page the DBA. API slow? Slack the backend team. Disk full?
Escalation Policy
An Escalation Policy defines what happens when the on-call person doesn't respond. Wait 5 minutes, then page the backup.
Opsgenie
Opsgenie is PagerDuty's competitor from Atlassian. It does the same thing — routes alerts, manages on-call schedules, wakes people up.
PagerDuty
PagerDuty is the tool that wakes you up at 3 AM when production is on fire.