How To Not Get Paged: Managing Oncall to Reduce Outages

Half Day Afternoon
(1:30 pm-5:00 pm)

Grand Ballroom A

LISA14: Culture
T8
Thomas A. Limoncelli, Stack Exchange, Inc.
Description: 

People think of “oncall” as responding to a pager that beeps because of an outage. In this class you will learn how to use oncall as a vehicle to improve system reliability so that you get paged less often.

This talk includes never-before seen material from the new book, “The Practice of Cloud System Administration” by Limoncelli, Chalup, Hogan.

Who should attend: 

Anyone with an oncall responsibility (or their manager).

Take back to work: 
  • How to monitor more accurately so you get paged less
  • How to design an oncall schedule so that it is more fair and less stressful
  • How to assure preventative work and long-term solutions get done between oncall shifts
  • How to conduct “Fire Drills” and “Game Day Exercises” to create antifragile systems
  • How to write a good Post-mortem document that communicates better and prevents future problems
Topics include: 
  • Why your monitoring strategy is broken and how to fix it
  • Building a more fair oncall schedule
  • Monitoring to detect outages vs. monitoring to improve reliability
  • Alert review strategies
  • Conducting “Fire Drills” and “Game Day Exercises”
  • "Blameless Post-mortem documents"
Presentation Type: 
Training