IR-001 recommended on-call-escalation
On-call rotation defined
When incidents happen outside business hours, someone needs to be responsible. A defined rotation ensures 24/7 coverage without burning out individuals.
Question to ask
"Who's getting paged at 2am if prod goes down tonight?"
Pass criteria
- ✓ On-call rotation documented (even if it's "founder handles everything for now")
- ✓ Clear who is responsible at any given time
- ✓ OR explicitly no after-hours coverage needed (side project, internal tool)
Fail criteria
- ✗ Nobody knows who's on call
- ✗ Verbal-only rotation
- ✗ Single point of failure with no backup
Related items
Verification guide
Severity: Recommended
When incidents happen outside business hours, someone needs to be responsible. A defined rotation ensures 24/7 coverage without burning out individuals.
Check automatically:
- Look for on-call documentation:
# Search for on-call docs
grep -riE "on-?call|rotation|pager|schedule" docs/ runbooks/ README.md CLAUDE.md --include="*.md" 2>/dev/null
# Check for PagerDuty/Opsgenie config
grep -riE "pagerduty|opsgenie|incident\.io" package.json .github/ terraform/ --include="*.json" --include="*.yml" --include="*.tf" 2>/dev/null
Ask user:
- "Do you have 24/7 coverage requirements?"
- "Who gets paged when production goes down at 3am?"
- "Is the rotation documented somewhere?"
Cross-reference with:
- IR-002 (escalation paths) - who to escalate to from on-call
- IR-004 (incident management tool) - often manages on-call scheduling
- Section 12 (monitoring/alerting) - alerts need to reach on-call
Pass criteria:
- On-call rotation documented (even if it's "founder handles everything for now")
- Clear who is responsible at any given time
- OR explicitly no after-hours coverage needed (side project, internal tool)
Fail criteria:
- Nobody knows who's on call
- Verbal-only rotation ("I think it's Bob this week?")
- Single point of failure with no backup
Evidence to capture:
- Location of on-call documentation
- Current rotation schedule or responsible person
- Tool used for scheduling (if any)