Incident Management Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published Mar 14, 2026 4 min read

The On-Call Prep Checklist Before Shift

5-minute prep before going on-call. The checklist that loads context.

Pre-shift review (5 minutes)

Active incidents in flight. Read the incident channels; understand current state. Don't inherit blind.

Recent deploys in the last 4 hours. Most pages tie to recent changes; knowing what shipped lets you correlate fast.

Open alerts that haven't fired but are in 'warning' state. Often these become real pages during your shift.

Synchronous handoff in chat. 'I'm up to speed on these incidents and recent deploys. Taking over.'

Outgoing on-call confirms acknowledgement. Until then, they are responsible.

Five-minute conversation if anything is weird. Recent flapping alerts; pending changes; stakeholder concerns. Tribal knowledge transfers verbally.

Pager app open and notifications enabled. Phone DND off for the on-call number. Test with a synthetic page if uncertain.

Dashboards bookmarked. Service health, deploy log, on-call context dashboard. One click from page to context.

Permissions tested. Can you actually run the runbook commands? Test in non-prod or with a dry-run before the real incident.

Home network and laptop charged. Backup hotspot available if home wifi is flaky.

Calendar cleared of non-essential meetings during your shift. On-call is the priority; other commitments aren't.

Family informed. They know you're on-call; the pager may go off at 3 AM.

When your shift ends, do the same checklist for the incoming on-call. Pay forward the discipline.

Document anything weird that happened during your shift. The next on-call benefits from context they didn't observe.

Update runbooks where you wished they had been clearer. The compounding effect makes the next shift easier.