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DevOps & Automation · Foundational

On-Call Rotation

A schedule that assigns engineers responsibility for responding to production alerts during defined periods.

Definition

Healthy rotations have enough people to limit pager load, clear escalation paths, runbooks, and handoffs. Google SRE suggests no more than about two incidents per 12-hour shift so each can be handled properly.

Example

A weekly primary/secondary rotation managed in PagerDuty with automatic escalation after 10 minutes.

Exam tip

Sustainable on-call and escalation policies are favored answers over 'hire more ops staff'.

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