Emergency Workflow
Emergencies from ASE accounts
An account with an Assigned Support Engineer (ASE) can submit an emergency either while you’re available or while you’re not.
In either case, it is important to note that you are not permanently on-call and, thus, are not required to take the emergency unless you’re the on-call engineer. However, at times like these it is important to remember that you are the Support Engineer with the most knowledge of the customer’s situation, problems and objectives, and therefore you might be able to save GitLab Support and the customer many hours of troubleshooting by working with the on-call team on such an emergency.
Processes for the ASE
When you’re available
If the on-call engineer notifies you of an emergency and you are either available or can be available, then work alongside the on-call engineer to stabilize the customer’s situation. This may involve any of the following:
- Taking over as DRI for the emergency
- Shadowing the emergency for some amount of time
- Troubleshooting the emergency in Slack, asynchronously
- Providing the on-call engineer with important information that will help them to work with the customer or to understand the customer’s environment
Any help you can provide will be appreciated.
When you’re not available
If you come back to work and see that an emergency took place while you weren’t available, then catch up on what happened and reach out to the customer to discuss any next steps.
If a big task is planned while you know you’ll be unavailable be proactive and prepare the on-call engineer.
Be proactive
If a task is planned after-hours that may lead to an emergency (an upcoming upgrade, migration, etc.) then it would be useful to create a summary of what’s planned, possible problems that could arise (if you know any), and suggested solutions. If you have other account-specific information that the on-call SE might need while troubleshooting (architecture info, problems, etc.), please put it into an internal note in the existing ticket leading up to the task so the on-call engineer can see it.
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