The Paging Volume Budget Per Engineer

Page volume per on-call shift is a leading indicator of burnout. The budget, the trend lines, and the conversation that prevents quitting.

The budget

3 pages per shift. Above that, the on-call is being woken excessively.

Daytime exception: business hours can sustain higher page volume because the engineer is awake anyway.

Sustained breach (4+ shifts in a row over budget): trigger the burnout protocol.

Trend lines

Track per-engineer per-shift page count. 90-day rolling average.

Trends up: the alert noise is increasing or the systems are degrading.

Trends down: the team is winning. Celebrate; do not let new alerts erode it.

The conversation

Monthly: SRE leadership reviews the trend with each on-call rotation.

If pages are trending up, what is causing it? Specific alerts; specific services.

Action items: tune the noisy alerts; staff up the rotation; fix the underlying flapping system.