# On-call

> A rotation of engineers who carry the pager and answer alerts outside working hours, so a page reaches a person rather than whoever happens to be looking at a dashboard. A good rotation is quiet, bounded, and paid for in sleep.

Reliability

## In Quorum

On-call rotation research (Series A, after Alerting) puts the team on the pager. The rotation acknowledges an Incident five calendar minutes after its first signal, so the MTTA stays short even when the player is away, and the Postmortem shows it. Without it a page waits for the player's first click. Every page counts against the engineers on the team that owns the Service it hit, and each page takes a little of their mood. A long quarter on call is one way an engineer comes to ask for time off, a raise, or their notice.

## Design

[The incident loop](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/design/11-incidents.md#the-incident-loop)

## Read next

[MTTD and MTTA](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/glossary/mttd-and-mtta.md), [MTTR](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/glossary/mttr.md), [SLO, SLA, SLI](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/glossary/slo-sla-sli.md)

## Learn more

- [Google SRE book: Being on-call](https://sre.google/sre-book/being-on-call/)
- [PagerDuty: What is on-call rotation?](https://www.pagerduty.com/resources/learn/what-is-on-call-rotation/)

## See also

- [Glossary](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/glossary.md)

Source: https://wiki.playquorum.dev/glossary/on-call