The holiday season is a time for celebration and relaxation. However, for oncall teams, it can also bring unique challenges.

For example, on January 4th 2021, Slack faced an outage as an overloaded AWS Transit Gateway couldn't handle the post-holiday traffic surge, causing message success rates to plummet from 99.999% to 99%—a significant dip by any standard.

Incidents like this can happen anytime—even during holidays. So, it’s important you have a strategy in place to tackle incidents without losing your holiday spirit.

In this post, we’ll dive into six effective strategies to balance your oncall duties with personal time so you don’t have to choose between system reliability and holiday joy.

Oncall challenges during holidays

Being on-call during the holidays is challenging as it demands upholding Service Level Agreements (SLAs) while also finding time to relax.

Here are a few key difficulties the oncall team faces during holidays:

1. Reduced Staffing: Holidays often mean fewer team members available, increasing the workload for those on call.
2. Heightened Stress: Balancing holiday commitments and resolving incidents quickly can lead to increased stress for oncall staff.
3. Work-life Imbalance: Oncall duties during holidays may disrupt personal plans, making it difficult to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
4. Limited Support: With many team members away, oncall staff may have fewer resources and support to handle complex issues.
5. Unpredictable Incident Volume: Holidays can bring unexpected spikes in incidents due to increased customer activity (depending on your service).

Though these challenges seem overwhelming, they can be tackled successfully. The next section unwraps strategies that help you resolve these challenges with ease.

Strategies for Effective Oncall Management During Holidays

Let’s dive into the strategies that help your oncall team enjoy the holiday cheer while managing incidents.

1. Pre-Planning and Preparation

Successful holiday oncall management starts with pre-planning and preparation.

Here are a few steps for you to get started:

• Create the oncall schedule in advance. This ensures fairness, transparency, and proper coverage throughout the holiday period.
• Don't forget those preemptive system checks and risk assessments. This is your opportunity to identify and address potential issues before they escalate.
• Lastly, optimize your monitoring setup to streamline incident management. Fine-tune alerts, adjust thresholds, and consider temporarily disabling any integrations that might generate false alarms. Learn how to fine-tune your monitoring system and alerts here.

2. Fair Rotation System

Alright, you've got your holiday oncall schedule mapped out. Now, how to make it work for your team?

The key is to set up a fair rotation system that distributes oncall duties evenly. This allows everyone to share responsibility and enjoy some well-deserved downtime. When creating your rotation, consider your team members' individual preferences and constraints. Work together to find a balance that suits everyone's needs.

3. Flexibility With Oncall Overrides

Remember, even the best plans can change during the holidays!

So, build flexibility into your rotation system by allowing swaps and last-minute adjustments to accommodate personal plans and unexpected events for your team. You can use Spike’s oncall override feature for this purpose. It ensures that there’s always someone available to tackle incidents.

💡 Responders on Spike tend to add more than 2x overrides during holidays!

4. Robust Escalation and Support Systems

Define a clear escalation path with subject matter experts or senior engineers who can provide guidance and support when things get tricky.

Also, make sure your oncall team has access to the resources they need to effectively troubleshoot and resolve incidents during the holidays.

Provide robust documentation and knowledge bases like runbooks, troubleshooting guides, and FAQs. This way, you can help your team resolve incidents quickly and reduce the need for escalations.

💡 Spike tip: Increase gaps between escalation steps to minimize alert fatigue and burnout, giving engineers more time to investigate and resolve incidents.

Last but not least, don’t forget to designate an experienced person from your team as fallback at the end of the escalation chain to provide guidance when all other avenues have been exhausted.

5. Dedicated channels for Collaboration during Holidays

For effective incident management, make sure that your team has clear communication channels in place.

This means setting up a centralized hub—be it a dedicated chat room or a virtual war room—where your oncall staff can swiftly converge, exchange updates, and escalate matters when necessary.

💡 Spike tip: On Slack or Teams, create a dedicated channel for incidents and control its notification settings individually.

Before the holiday season kicks in, motivate your team to review the most common incidents, identify patterns and recurring issues, and create clear documentation and notes for each one.

This upfront effort empowers your oncall team to swiftly resolve incidents, ensuring a smoother holiday period for everyone involved.

6. Prioritize OnCall Team Well-Being

Being oncall while juggling family commitments during holidays can be stressful, so encourage your oncall team to prioritize their well-being along with incident management responsibilities.

Provide resources and support like flexible working arrangements that allow them to balance oncall duties with holiday plans.

Spike offers greater flexibility with different work modes:

• Deep Work: For those times you need to focus, it keeps the minor alerts at bay.
• Cooldown: Take a break by offloading your duties to a colleague.
• Out of Office: Going on a vacation? A quick click and your responsibilities are covered.

Also, be smart about your alert setup. Mute low-severity incidents or redirect alerts for common issues to less noisy channels, so your team can focus on critical alerts without getting bogged down by minor issues.

Wrap UP

Managing oncall duties during the holidays can be challenging, but it doesn't have to be a trade-off between system reliability and team well-being.

By implementing the strategies discussed in this post, you can empower your oncall staff to handle incidents effectively while still enjoying the holiday season.

Remember, your oncall team is the backbone of your system's reliability during the holidays. So, invest in their well-being, provide the necessary resources, and leverage tools like Spike to ensure they can navigate challenges with ease.

Happy holidays, and may your incidents be few and far between!