On-call mind set: 5 rules

Be the customer advocate. Think in terms of how the issues are affecting our customers (Merchants, Shopper, dependent services).

Be curious. Understand and read the wikis that talk about what is high priority and what is low priority outage. Don’t be caught without basic knowledge for lack of curiosity.

Err on the safer side. No one was ever was guilt of being overcautious and filing an incident. It is ok, if 2 out of three incident get closed as false alarm. There is a lot of guilt associated with missing a real incident.

Be the owner. As an owner, you don’t have to do the work yourself, all the time. But you have to ensure that work takes place, and it is of high quality. You are after all responsible for the quality of the domain and services that you are operating.

Plan for it. When the pager-duty is ringing, there isn’t a time to email to ask ‘who is the PoC for that upstream caller’. Be prepared with all the possible scenarios, with contacts, drills, dashboards, permissions. You owe that mental peace to yourself.