On-Call Metrics: Pages-per-Shift and Beyond

If you only measure one on-call metric, measure pages-per-shift. The others give you the diagnosis when the headline number goes wrong.

Headline metric

Pages per shift: the simplest correlate of on-call burden.

Threshold: <2 healthy; 3-5 acceptable; 6+ red flag.

Four supporting metrics

• 1. Time-to-acknowledge.
• 2. Time-to-mitigate.
• 3. False-positive rate.
• 4. Self-resolved-without-action rate.

Team comparison

Per-team pages-per-shift; one team always above 5 = systemic; intervene.

Avoid public shaming; use as conversation starter.

Leadership conversation

Take the metrics to engineering leadership quarterly. Use them to defend reliability investment.

Without numbers, reliability work loses to feature work in budget conversations.

Antipatterns

• No metrics. No conversation.
• One metric only. No diagnosis.
• Public team comparison. Punitive.

What to do this week

Three moves. (1) Apply this practice to your next on-call rotation. (2) Survey the team after one cycle. (3) Iterate based on feedback; the discipline is the cadence.