Incident Management
Practical
By Samson Tanimawo, PhD
Published Feb 13, 2026
4 min read
Monitoring the On-Call
The on-call rotation is itself a system that needs monitoring. The metrics.
Live workflow · 3 working · 1 queuedLive
Signal · gather Working
Decide · pick action Working
Apply · with verify Working
Learn · update playbook Queued
Page volume
Per shift; per engineer; per service. Trends and outliers.
Healthy: bounded; predictable.
Response time
Time from page to acknowledgement. Time from acknowledgement to action.
Trends: response time slowing means burnout or degraded tooling.
Rotation health
Engineers per rotation. Tenure on rotation. Voluntary departures.
Leading indicator of staffing problems.