Rootly On-Call Management
Overview
Rootly's on-call management provides visibility into who is currently on-call, what incidents occurred during a shift, and whether responders are at risk of burnout. For MSPs and SRE teams, the on-call tools help with:
- Shift Handoffs — Generate a structured summary of open incidents and shift history before handing off to the next responder
- Health Monitoring — Detect workload health risks before they cause burnout or missed pages
- Shift Metrics — Analyse incident volume, severity distribution, and response time per user, team, or schedule
- Incident Scoping — Pull only the incidents that occurred during a specific shift period
MCP Tools
On-Call Tools
| Tool | Description | Key Parameters |
|---|---|---|
get_oncall_handoff_summary | Current/next on-call status plus incidents from the current shift | Schedule or team context |
get_oncall_shift_metrics | Shift metrics grouped by user, team, or schedule | group_by, time range |
get_shift_incidents | Incidents filtered to a specific shift timeframe | severity, status, tags, time range |
check_oncall_health_risk | Detects workload health risk in scheduled responders | Schedule/team context |
Key Concepts
On-Call Shift Structure
A shift is a period assigned to one or more responders in a schedule. Rootly supports:
- Simple rotations — Daily/weekly hand-offs (Engineer A → Engineer B → Engineer C)
- Follow-the-sun — Regional rotations based on business hours
- Layered schedules — Primary + secondary + escalation policy
- Temporary overrides — One-off coverage swaps without changing the base schedule
Health Risk Indicators
check_oncall_health_risk analyses patterns that correlate with burnout:
| Indicator | Description |
|---|---|
| High incident volume | Significantly more incidents than the rolling average for this shift |
| Late-night pages | High proportion of pages during sleep hours |
| Long time-to-resolve | Incidents taking significantly longer than the team average |
| Repeat pages | Same alert firing multiple times (suggests a systemic issue, not a one-off) |
| Short time between pages | Responder has not had recovery time between incidents |
Escalation Policies
When a page is not acknowledged within the configured timeout:
- Tier 1 — Primary on-call responder
- Tier 2 — Secondary responder or team lead
- Tier 3 — Engineering manager or global escalation
- Fallback — Slack channel broadcast, status page alert
Common Workflows
On-Call Handoff (End of Shift)
Before handing off to the incoming responder:
- Call
get_oncall_handoff_summaryto get a structured overview:- Who is currently on-call and when their shift ends
- Who is next on-call and when they take over
- Open/in-triage incidents from the current shift with status and severity
- Review any
in_triageincidents — add a handoff note as an action item on each open incident - Call
get_shift_incidentsto list all incidents during the shift (for the outgoing responder's records) - Share the handoff summary in the team's Slack channel or incident war room
Reviewing Shift Health (Manager / Team Lead)
- Call
check_oncall_health_riskfor the current schedule or team - Review flagged risks (high volume, late-night pages, repeat alerts)
- If risk is elevated:
- Consider temporarily adding a secondary responder
- Review the repeat alerts for systemic fixes (runbook gaps, noisy alerts)
- Check if open incidents can be deprioritised to reduce cognitive load
- Call
get_oncall_shift_metricsgrouped byuserto identify individual responder load imbalances
Weekly On-Call Retrospective
- Call
get_oncall_shift_metricswithgroup_by=schedulefor the past 7 days - Review incident volume per shift and per responder
- Identify the top noisy alerts (high frequency, low severity)
- Identify incidents that escalated beyond Tier 1 (indicates alerting or runbook gaps)
- Create action items in Rootly for the top 3 improvement areas
Pre-Deployment Health Check
Before a major deployment or planned maintenance window:
- Call
check_oncall_health_riskto confirm responders are not already overloaded - Call
get_oncall_handoff_summaryto confirm the on-call team is available during the deployment window - If health risk is elevated, consider scheduling the deployment during a lighter shift
Shift Incident Review
After a shift ends, review its full incident history:
- Call
get_shift_incidentsscoped to the shift time range - Filter by
severity=criticalorseverity=highto focus on the most impactful events - For each critical incident, call
find_related_incidentsto check if it is part of a pattern - Flag recurring incidents for postmortem action items
Field Reference
Handoff Summary Fields
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
current_oncall | Name and contact of the current on-call responder |
next_oncall | Name, contact, and handoff time of the next responder |
shift_start | When the current shift started |
shift_end | When the current shift ends |
open_incidents | List of in-progress incidents: ID, title, severity, status |
resolved_incidents | Incidents resolved during this shift |
Shift Metrics Fields
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
group | User, team, or schedule name |
incident_count | Total incidents during the period |
mttr | Mean time to resolve (seconds) |
mtta | Mean time to acknowledge (seconds) |
escalations | Number of incidents that escalated beyond Tier 1 |
severity_breakdown | Incident count by severity level |
Error Handling
| Error | Cause | Resolution |
|---|---|---|
| No schedule found | Team or schedule not configured | Verify schedule exists in Rootly Settings > On-Call |
| Empty handoff summary | No incidents in current shift | This is expected for quiet shifts — healthy outcome |
| Health risk unavailable | Insufficient historical data | Need at least 2-3 past shifts to baseline |
| 401 Unauthorized | Invalid API token | Regenerate at Account > Manage API Keys |
Best Practices
- Run handoff summary before every shift transition — Prevents dropped context between responders
- Act on health risk signals early — Don't wait for burnout; rotate responders proactively
- Review shift metrics weekly — Trending upward volume is an early warning of systemic issues
- Tag incidents during a shift — Labels like
deployment-relatedorthird-partymake shift analysis more useful - Combine with incident tools — Always pair on-call review with
find_related_incidentsfor recurring alerts
Related Skills
- Incidents — Incident lifecycle, AI analysis, action items
- API Patterns — Auth, pagination, all available tools