The 3 AM Phone Rings Again: 7 Engineering Decisions for On-Call Rotation Design and Fatigue Management
Overview 3 AM. Your phone buzzes. P1 alert — order service 5xx error rate spiking. You drag yourself out of bed, fire up the laptop, pull logs, check Grafana, trace it to a saturated upstream database connection pool. Restart, scale up, recover. It’s 4:30 AM. The next morning, nursing dark circles in the standup, someone mentions that last night’s alert was actually a false positive. If you’ve worked in operations, you know this feeling....