<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
On 14/07/10 00:11, Martin A. Brooks wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:0f610c8fb6b6091836b5dc0312282257.squirrel@olga.hinterlands.org"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Written to scratch an itch. If you do oncall, or have to manage it, this
might be of interest:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://blog.hinterlands.org/2010/07/running-an-oncall-rota/">http://blog.hinterlands.org/2010/07/running-an-oncall-rota/</a>
</pre>
</blockquote>
I find this one interesting:<br>
<br>
<li>Have realistic expectations of oncall response times. If you need
to guarantee that problems are attended to within 20-30 minutes then
you should be running an overnight shift, not oncall.</li>
<br>
Where I'm working, they have 15-minute response times, so people end up
dumping a half-full trolley of shopping in the supermarket to go home
and dial in to work, etc. However, the volume is relatively low (on
average less than 1 call per shift), which would make it very difficult
to justify paying a sensible rate for a rota of decent engineers, plus
out-of-hours compensation, to deal with maybe one issue per day;
out-of-hours is 5x18h Monday-Friday plus 2x24h weekend. That's 138
hours, or 3.5 full-time positions. Add to that, they have a first-line
and second-line support, so realistically 7 full-time positions to deal
with maybe 5 out-of-hours incidents per week.<br>
<br>
There is also an Ops team in the Production datacentre, who should deal
with any initial alerts; what I don't have visibility of, is how many
issues they deal with, that therefore don't go to 1st/2nd-line support.
Realistically, an estate of <2000 servers should have very few
out-of-hours emergencies; surely replacing a mirrored root-disk can
wait til morning (unless it fails at 6pm Friday at the start of a bank
holiday weekend)?<br>
<br>
Fortunately for me, I'm not on the rota (though I am technically
available if first- and second- line support can't deal with the
problem)<br>
<br>
Steve<br>
</body>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
</html>