Oncall - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 288

Schedule Coordination
Oncall schedules may be coordinated with other schedules. For example, it may be a
guideline that the week before your oncall shift, you are onduty. There may be a dedicated
schedule of escalation points. For example, people knowledgeable in a particular service
may coordinate to make sure that they aren't all on vacation at the same time. That ensures
that if oncall needs to escalate to them, someone is available. Sometimes an escalation
schedule is an informal agreement, and sometimes it is a formal schedule with an SLA.
Compensation
Compensation drives some design elements of the schedule. In some countries, being on-
call requires compensation if response time is less than a certain interval. The compens-
ation is usually a third of the normal hourly salary for any hour oncall outside of normal
business hours. It may be paid in cash or by giving the oncall person time off. Compensa-
tion rates may be different if the person is called to action. Your human resources depart-
ment should be able to provide all the details required. In some countries, there is no legal
obligation for oncall compensation but good companies do it anyway because it is unethic-
al otherwise. One benefit of follow-the-sun coverage is that it can be constructed in a way
that maximizes time oncall during normal business hours for a location, while minimizing
the amount of additional compensation that needs to be budgeted.
14.1.5 The Oncall Calendar
The oncall calendar documentswhoisoncallwhen.Itturnsthetheoryofthescheduleand
roster into specifics. The monitoring system uses this information to decide who to send
alerts to.
Set the calendar far enough ahead to permit all concerned to plan vacations, travel, and
other responsibilities in advance. Three to six months is usually sufficient. The details of
building the calendar are as varied as there are teams. A team of six that changes the on-
call person every Wednesday may simply use the “repeating event” functionality of an on-
line calendar to schedule who is oncall when. Conflicts and other issues can be worked out
between members.
A more complex schedule and a larger team require proportionately more complex
calendar building strategies. One such system used a shared, online spreadsheet such as
Google Drive. The spreadsheet cells represented each time slot for the next three months.
Due to the size of the team, everyone was expected to take three time slots. The system
was “first come, first served,” and there was a lot of back-channel discussion that enabled
people to trade time slots. The negotiating continued until a certain cut-off point, at which