Practice of Cloud System Administration, The: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2

by Thomas A. Limoncelli

One strategy is to write an end-of-shift report that is emailed to the entire oncall roster. Sending it to just the next person oncall is vulnerable to error. You may pick the wrong person by mistake, or may not know about a substitution that was negotiated. Sending the report to everyone keeps the entire team up-to-date and gives everyone an opportunity to get involved if needed. The end-of-shift report should include any notable events that happened and anything that the next shift needs to know. For example, it should identify an ongoing outage or behaviors that need manual monitoring. Another strategy is to have an explicit handoff to the next shift. This means the outgoing person must explicitly state that he or she is handing off responsibility to the next person, and the next person must positively acknowledge the handoff. If the next person does not or cannot acknowledge the handoff, then responsibility stays with the original person.