Oncall - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 297

14.2.7 End-of-Shift Responsibilities
Eventually your shift will end and it will be time to hand off oncall to the next person.
Making sure the transition goes well ensures that context is transferred to the next person
and open issues are not forgotten.
Onestrategy istowritean end-of-shift report thatisemailed totheentireoncallroster.
Sending it to just the next person oncall is vulnerable to error. You may pick the wrong
person by mistake, or may not know about a substitution that was negotiated. Sending the
report to everyone keeps the entire team up-to-date and gives everyone an opportunity to
get involved if needed.
The end-of-shift report should include any notable events that happened and anything
that the next shift needs to know. For example, it should identify an ongoing outage or be-
haviors that need manual monitoring.
Another strategy is to have an explicit handoff to the next shift. This means the outgo-
ing person must explicitly state that he or she is handing off responsibility to the next per-
son, and the next person must positively acknowledge the handoff. If the next person does
not or cannot acknowledge the handoff, then responsibility stays with the original person.
This technique is used in situations where availability requirements are very strict.
In this case the end-of-shift report may be verbal or via email. A written report is better
because it communicates to the entire team.
If shift change happens when one or both parties may be asleep, a simple email may be
sufficient if there are no ongoing issues. If there are ongoing issues, the next oncall person
should be alerted. If the outgoing person will be asleep when the shift changes, it is com-
mon practice to send out a provisional end-of-shift report , noting that unless there are
alerts between now and the shift change, this report can be considered final.
14.3 Between Oncall Shifts
The normal working hours between shifts should be spent on project work. That includes
follow-up tasks related to oncall alerts. While such work can be done during oncall time,
sleep is usually more important.
Projects related to oncall include working on the long-term solutions that weren't pos-
sible to implement during oncall and postmortem reports.
14.3.1 Long-Term Fixes
Eachalertmaygeneratefollow-upworkthatcannotbedoneduringtheoncallperiod.Large
problems may require a causal analysis to determine the root cause of the outage.