What Customers Actually Want from On-Call
Step back to what the customer actually wants from on-call, and the answer is short: a working service, a fast fix, clear communication, no repeats. PagerDuty, Grafana, Datadog, Sentry, Slack — each does its job, and each does it well. But those are the team’s tools, not the customer’s vocabulary. The customer’s ask is four things: the service works; when it breaks it gets fixed fast; I’m told what’s happening; the same problem doesn’t keep happening. That’s the whole list. Every paging tool, every dashboard, every status page, every postmortem template is implementation detail of how a team delivers those four. ...