Tier 2 Oncall Onboarding

Onboarding Process for Teams

Identifying participants

Identify which team members will participate in the new rotation.

Tier 2 rotations are for subject matter experts. On average, they should know more about their subject matter than engineers outside of the group.

Consider providing training material to confirm that participants are subject matter experts.

Defining a rotation pattern

The recommendation is to create three groups of team members: AMER, EMEA and APAC

For example, the Tier 1 EOC rotation uses the following times for shifts (all times UTC):

• EMEA 07:00 to 15:00
• AMER 15:00 to 23:00
• APAC 23:00 to 07:00

Rotations do not need to stick to these times and rotation leaders can be flexible with how the shifts are arranged. 3 shifts of equal length are recommended to make it easier to manage, but the rotation leader should consider the ordinary working hours of team members and incorporate this as far as possible.

Use the team onboarding template to set up the new rotation.

Escalation paths

Define the escalation procedures for when an on-call team member doesn’t respond to a page. These escalation paths are encoded in Incident.io for each rotation. Some options are below:

Options include:

1. Setting the page to round-robin all team members after 15 minuntes
2. Creating an escalation schedule of a smaller group
3. Creating a shared escalation schedule consisting of rotation leaders

Escalations are rare, but it’s still important to have a plan to respond to requests for help.

Holiday Coverage and Team Events

At certain times of year there are fewer people available to be on-call. During these times, the rotation leader needs to plan for how to continue to provide coverage.

Specifics regarding the Pilot Program

Team members are not required to work on public holidays in their region, even if they fall on a weekday. Team members must notify the rotation leader of their holidays and the team member should arrange their own coverage swap.

To clarify, the Pilot program does not need to provide weekend or public holiday cover. But if you have team members available in regions where it is not a public holiday, you should arrange your rotation to take this into account.