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 is the headline because it correlates directly with the lived experience of being on-call. Other metrics give diagnosis when the headline goes wrong.
- Definition. Total pages divided by total shifts in the period; per-engineer or per-rotation.
- Healthy. Under 2 pages per shift; on-call sleeps; deep work continues.
- Acceptable. 3-5 pages per shift; tolerable for short stretches, not sustainable.
- Red flag. 6+ pages per shift; burnout follows; retention drops; act this quarter.
Four supporting metrics
- 1. Time-to-acknowledge.
- 2. Time-to-mitigate.
- 3. False-positive rate.
- 4. Self-resolved-without-action rate.
Team comparison
Cross-team comparison surfaces systemic issues. One team consistently at the red end is rarely a staffing problem; it is usually an architecture or alert-tuning problem.
- Per-team chart. Pages-per-shift broken out by team, trend lines over the last four quarters.
- Persistent outliers. A team always above 5 pages per shift signals a systemic issue worth intervention.
- Use as starter. Open the conversation with curiosity; data is a prompt, not a verdict.
- Avoid public shaming. Comparison is for the manager-and-tech-lead conversation, not all-hands slides.
Leadership conversation
The metrics earn their keep when reliability investment shows up in the next planning round. Without numbers, reliability work loses to features.
- Quarterly review. Take the metrics to engineering leadership every quarter; do not wait for a crisis.
- Trend over absolute. Direction beats the snapshot; a service heading from 3 to 5 needs investment now.
- Pair with cost. Add engineer-time-on-pager so the headcount cost of unreliability is explicit.
- Concrete asks. Walk in with the staffing or roadmap change you want; data plus ask beats data alone.
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.