Information Technology Reference
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names: ticket time, ticket week, ticket duty, or simply onduty. Generally the onduty roster
is made up of the same people who are on the oncall roster.
The primary responsibility of the onduty person is to respond to tickets within the
SLA—for example, 1 business day for initial response; no service at night, weekends, and
holidays. Usually the onduty person is responsible for triaging new tickets, prioritizing
them, working most of them, and delegating special cases to appropriate people.
Most organizations have different oncall and onduty schedules. In some organizations,
whoeverisoncallisautomaticallyonduty.Thissimplifiesschedulingbuthasthedisadvant-
age that if an emergency occurs, tickets will be ignored. That said, for large emergencies
tickets will be ignored anyway. Moreover, if there is an emergency that keeps the oncall
personawake late atnight,thenextdaythat personmaynotbeathisorherbest; expecting
this individual to respond to tickets under such conditions isn't a good idea. For that reas-
on, you should try to keep a separate oncall schedule unless ticket load is extremely light.
Some organizations do not have onduty at all. They may not be in a situation where
there are users who would file tickets with them. Some teams feel that accepting tickets
goes against the DevOps philosophy. They are collaborators, they say, not a service desk
that people come to with requests. If there is a request to collaborate, it should be handled
through the normal business channels. During collaboration, any tasks assigned should be
in the work tracking system just like all other project-related tasks.
14.1.4 Oncall Schedule Design
There are many variations on how to structure the oncall schedule. The duration of a per-
son's oncall shift should be structured in a way that makes the most sense for your team.
Here are some variations that are commonly used:
Weekly: A person is oncall for one week at a time. The next shift starts the same
time each week, such as every Wednesday at noon. Having the change occur mid-
week is better than during the weekend. If the change happens on a Wednesday,
each onduty person has one complete weekend where travel and other fun are lim-
ited. If the transition happens on Saturday, then it ruins the weekend of both oncall
people for two weekends in a row. On Mondays, there may be a backlog of follow-
up work from the weekend. It is best to let the person who handled the weekend
alerts complete the follow-up work, or at least generate the appropriate tickets and
documentation, while still oncall. This enables a clean handover and should allow
each person to return to project work as quickly as possible after oncall duty ends.
Daily: A person is oncall for one day at a time. This may seem better than a
weekly schedule because the shift is not as long, but it means being oncall much
more often. A weekly schedule might mean being oncall one week out of every
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