Oncall - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 296

Intentionallyselectabaselineofknowledgethatisassumed.Thereshouldbedocument-
ation that will take a new employee and bring him or her up to that level. The oncall doc-
uments, then, can assume that level of knowledge. This also helps prevent the situation
wheredocumentationbecomestooverboseandrepetitive.Requiringauthorstoincludetoo
much detail can become an impediment to writing documentation at all.
14.2.6 Third-Party Escalation
Sometimes escalations must include someone outside the operations team, such as the on-
call team of a different service or a vendor. Escalating to a third party has special consider-
ations.
During an outage, one should not have to waste time researching how to contact the
third party. All third-party dependencies should be documented. There should be a single
globally accessible list that has the oncall information for each internal team. If the oncall
numbers change with each shift, this list should be dynamically generated with the current
information.
Lists of contact information for vendors usually contain information that should not be
shared outside of the team and, therefore, is stored differently. For each dependency, this
private list should include the vendor name, contact information, and anything needed to
open a support issue. For example, there may be license information or support contract
numbers.
Tips for Managing Vendor Escalations
Sometimes support cases opened with a vendor remain open for many days. When
this happens:
• One person should interface with the vendor for the duration of the issue.
Otherwise, communication and context can become disorganized.
• Trust but verify. Do not let a vendor close the case until you have verified the
issue is resolved.
• Report the issue to your sales contact only if you are not getting results. Other-
wise, the sales representative may meddle, which is annoying to technical sup-
port people.
• Take ownership of the issue. Do not assume the vendor will. Be the person
who follows up and makes sure the process keeps moving.
• When possible, make follow-up calls early in the day. This sets up the vendor
to spend the day working on your issue.