24x7 Operations

Role Keepers

  • Adrian Haas

  • Alexander Dehmel

  • Gabriel Saratura

  • Nick Marti

  • David Gubler

  • Sandro Kaspar

Delegator

VSHN (Anchor Circle)

Coordination

Adrian Haas

Contact

Purpose

At VSHN, we offer managed services, self-service products, and custom solutions, including optional availability guarantees and 24x7 support as defined in our product definitions and contracted SLAs. We need incident and support handling to work according to our SLAs with customers.

Key responsibilities

List the essential responsibilities assigned to this role.

  • Organize the handling of relevant incidents 24x7

  • Organize the handling of relevant support cases 24x7

  • Understand requirements according to our product/SLA definitions and make them tangible for engineers (especially for OnCall)

  • Select and drive the implementation of needed tooling

  • Ensure appropriate compensation for OnCall

Stakeholders & Key Deliverables

Whom does this role deliver value to, and what do they need from this role?

Product Manager
  • A working OnCall organization that implements their product/offering definition (SLAs) well enough

Participating Engineers
  • Clarity on expectations (shifts to cover, alerting, required response times, expectations & limits of incident response)

  • Working rotations and alerting tooling

  • Access to needed training and documentation

  • On-call compensation, yearly reporting, and payout of on-call compensation

Dependencies

Who and what does this role depend on?

Teams (via Product Owner)
  • Runbooks/tangible documentation on how to handle expected incidents

  • Onboarding and continued training for OnCall engineers meant to cover their tech stack

  • Timely addressing of repeating issues and false-positive alerts

Customer (Key) Account Manager
  • Follow-up with customers, if OnCall was used beyond purpose

  • Custom contracts comply with our SLA Profiles / Support Plans

  • Information on which customer/solution has which VSHN SLA profile/support plan option, easily accessible.

VSHN (Anchor Circle)
  • Budget for OnCall compensation

Constraints

Legal
  • OnCall shifts, rest times, and maximum work time must comply with applicable labor law

  • Customer contracts use our SLA / Support Plan, no individual definitions.

General
  • New (product) offerings or changes to SLA options need to be defined in collaboration, before they reach GA (have customers)

  • Every Engineer at VSHN is part of the OnCall organization by default, independent of team or skills

  • OnCall Engineers do their best to fix things or provide support; they get available support if out of their depth and don’t do risky work that increases the damage

  • An OnCall organization (VSHNeers being on-call in their private time) is limited to urgent incidents (service down or highly degraded) and support in urgent cases (customer’s business is blocked) as defined in Service Level Agreements (Product SLA Profiles and Support Plan)