Modern On-Call: Building Schedules and Systems That Actually Work#modern-on-call-building-schedules-and-systems-that-actually-work

In today’s reliability-driven world, customers expect your service to be available 24x7. Even a few minutes of downtime can have a massive impact on customer trust, revenue, and brand reputation. That’s why on-call coverage is a necessity for nearly every engineering team.

But setting up on-call in a way that enables fast, effective incident response and keeps your engineers sane is no small task.

The key: equitable rotations, clear guardrails, smart automation, and a culture that treats incidents as opportunities to improve.

On-Call Practices and Policies#on-call-practices-and-policies

The moment an incident occurs is the worst time to decide how to respond. Your on-call policies and practices should make it easy for engineers to know exactly what to do, when, and how — without having to improvise under pressure.

When defining these policies:

• Involve engineers in creating them so they’re realistic and fair
• Document escalation paths and responsibilities clearly
• Keep them accessible and up-to-date

This way, responders can focus on solving the problem, not figuring out the process.

Creating Rotation Schedules#creating-rotation-schedules

Your first step is to build an on-call schedule that ensures the right people are available for the right systems at the right times.

Best practices for rotation schedules:

• Assign rotations based on service ownership and domain expertise
• Balance shifts to avoid overloading certain individuals
• Consider shadow or training rotations for onboarding new engineers
• Make it easy to swap shifts when necessary
• Regularly review workload data to prevent burnout

Even the best-designed schedule will need adjustments over time. Product launches, team changes, and evolving infrastructure can all shift on-call needs. Be prepared to adapt.

Accessibility matters: Your schedule should be easy to find, easy to update, and integrated with your alerting and communication tools.

Defining Escalation and Response Policies#defining-escalation-and-response-policies

Alert fatigue is real — but so is the cost of missing a critical incident. Striking the right balance requires well-defined escalation rules.

Key steps:

• Classify incidents by severity and business impact
• Decide who gets alerted for each severity level
• Establish timelines for resolution that align with your SLAs and SLOs
• Include runbooks so responders can start troubleshooting immediately

For example:

• A total outage affecting all customers might trigger an immediate, all-hands response
• A slow-loading feature might be logged for review during business hours unless it escalates

Review escalation rules regularly and update them based on retrospective learnings.

Cultivating On-Call Culture#cultivating-on-call-culture

Between being called out of bed in the wee hours, having to handle incidents with fewer teammates and resources than normal, and facing extreme pressure to restore service as business reputation is on the line, on-call can be an extremely stressful experience. Being overwhelmed by on-call responsibilities, believing that on-call duties are assigned unfairly, or generally feeling under-appreciated can quickly destroy engineers’ morale and accelerate burnout.

Combat these challenges by cultivating an empathetic on-call culture that puts people first.

Involve engineers in setting schedules and other policies. Hear out their experiences, celebrating their successes and addressing their struggles. Make sure you hear these concerns blamelessly; instead of attributing setbacks or miscommunications to individuals, look at the systems behind them. Protect against a ‘hero’ culture, and embrace sustainable on-call through eliminating single points of failure, and embracing smaller and more frequent changes, distributed rotations, and continuous learning.

Reframe incidents from failures and setbacks to investments in future reliability — every incident, when properly addressed, makes the response to each future incident better. Likewise, each on-call shift is an investment in making future on-call shifts better. When there’s challenges in load balancing, having effective responses prepared, or proper escalation, embrace them as opportunities to refine and grow.

Choosing the Right On-Call Tool#choosing-the-right-on-call-tool

While you can manage on-call manually, the right platform can make scheduling, escalation, and incident response far easier and more reliable.

When evaluating on-call tools, look for:

• Multi-channel alerting (phone, SMS, chat, email)
• Broad integrations with your monitoring, logging, and collaboration stack
• Alert grouping, filtering, and de-duplication to cut noise
• Team-based schedule management
• Calendar visualization for quick coverage checks
• Analytics to track workload and coverage gaps
• High delivery reliability for alerts

Why FireHydrant Is the Modern Choice#why-firehydrant-is-the-modern-choice

Legacy tools like PagerDuty and Opsgenie were built for a different era of on-call — one where the pager was the main interface and incidents were siloed from the rest of your reliability practices.

FireHydrant Signals is built for how modern teams actually operate:

• All-in-one platform: On-call scheduling, alerting, and incident management in a single place
• Flexible rotations: Primary, secondary, and shadow schedules in one view
• Smarter escalations: Route by service ownership or severity, with built-in context and runbooks
• Proactive coverage: Detect and fix schedule gaps before they cause issues
• Built-in improvement: Track follow-ups, review past incidents, and refine processes over time
• Fair pricing: Pay for what you use, not inflated legacy contracts

With FireHydrant, on-call isn’t just about reacting — it’s about building a sustainable, scalable system that improves with every incident.

Ready to modernize your on-call? Get a demo of FireHydrant Signals