One post tagged with "On-call"

It's 5:15 AM. An alert fires: payments-api, p99 latency > 2000ms for 5m. Olivia's on call. The team has a runbook, but that’s not where she looks for the solution. She completely ignores it. The last few times she followed one at 5 AM, the fix didn’t match the symptom, or the runbook links attached to the alerts were wrong. So she opens Slack, finds a thread from eight months ago, copies the fix, and goes back to bed.

You wrote that runbook. She didn't use it, and she had reasons. This isn't a failure on Olivia's part. Here's why on-call engineers reach for Slack history before the docs you maintain, and what you can do about it.