On-Call
A rotation where designated people respond to urgent service issues outside normal planned work.
Plain English
Someone is assigned to react when production needs help.
In context
On-call work includes alerts triage mitigation escalation and handoff backed by clear expectations and support.
Example
“The on-call engineer is investigating the alert.”
When you'll hear this
- incident response
- production support
- service alerts
Common misunderstanding
On-call should not mean one person is continuously available without boundaries.
Also known as
pager duty
Commonly used by
Related terms
Updated: 2026-08-25
