On-call is a practice where engineers take turns being the primary responder for production alerts during a designated time window. The on-call engineer is responsible for acknowledging alerts, investigating issues, and either resolving incidents or escalating them appropriately.
A healthy on-call rotation distributes the burden fairly across the team, provides adequate rest periods between shifts, has clear escalation paths for situations beyond the primary responder's expertise, and includes compensation or time-off policies to prevent burnout.
Modern on-call management requires tooling that supports schedule management, multi-channel alerting (push, SMS, phone call), automatic escalation for unacknowledged alerts, and integration with monitoring systems. Hyperping's on-call feature allows teams to set up rotations, define escalation policies, and receive alerts through their preferred channels.
