Infisical is mission-critical software, which means minimizing service disruptions is a top priority. To make sure we can react to any issues that come up, we have an on-call rotation that helps us to provide responsive, 24x7x365 support to our customers. Being part of the on-call rotation is an opportunity to deepen the understanding of our infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and customer-facing systems. Having this broader understanding of our system not only helps us design better software but also enhances the overall stability of our platform.

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On-Call Overview

Rotation Details Each engineer will be on call once a week, from Thursday to Thursday, including weekends. During this time, the on-call engineer is expected to be available at all times to respond to service disruption alerts. While being on call, you are responsible for acting as the first line of defense for critical incidents and answering customer support inquiries. During your working hours, you must respond to all support tickets or involve relevant team members with sufficient context. Outside of working hours, you are expected to be available for any high-severity pager alerts and critical support inquiries by customers.

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Responsibilities While On Call

During your working hours, prioritize the following in this order:
  1. Responding to Alerts:
    • Monitor and respond promptly to all PagerDuty alerts.
    • Investigate incidents, determine root causes, and mitigate issues.
    • Refer to runbooks or any relevant documentation to resolve alarms quickly.
  2. Customer Support:
    • Actively monitor all support inquiries in Pylon and respond to incoming tickets.
    • Debug and resolve customer issues. If you encounter a problem outside your expertise, collaborate with the relevant teammates to resolve it. This is an opportunity to learn and build context for future incidents.
  3. Sprint work:
    • Since the current on-call workload does not require all of your working hours, you are expected to work on the sprint items assigned to you. If the on-call workload increases significantly, inform Maidul to make adjustments.
  4. Continuous Improvement:
    • Take note of recurring patterns, inefficiencies, and opportunities where we can automate to reduce on-call burdens in the future.
Outside of working hours, you are expected to be available and respond to any high-severity pager alerts and critical support inquiries by customers.

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Before You Get On Call

  • Set Up PagerDuty: Ensure you have the PagerDuty mobile app installed, configured, and notifications enabled for Infisical services.
  • Access Required Tools: Verify access to internal network, runbooks on Notion, https://grafana.infisical.com, access to aws accounts and any other access you may require.
  • AWS Permissions: You will be granted sufficient AWS permissions before the start of your on-call shift in case you need to access production accounts.

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At the End of Your Shift

  • Post an on-call summary in the Slack channel #on-call-summaries at the end of your shift using the following template. Include notable findings, support inquires and incidents you encountered. This will helps the rest of the team stay in the loop and open discussions on how to prevent similar issues in the future.
  • Do a handoff meeting/slack huddle with the next engineer on call to summarize any outstanding work, unresolved issues, or any incidents that require follow-up. Ensure the next on-call engineer is fully briefed so they can pick up where you left off. Include Maidul in this hand off call.

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When to escalate an incident

If you are paged for incident that you cannot resolve after attempting to debug and mitigate the issue, you should not hesitate to escalate and page others in. It’s better to get help sooner rather than later to minimize the impact on customers.
  • Paging relevant teammate: If you’ve tried resolving an issue on your own and need additional help, page another engineer who might be relevant through PagerDuty.
  • Escalating to Maidul: You can page Maidul at any time if you think it would be helpful.

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How to be successful on you rotations

  • Be on top of all changes that get merged into main. This will help you be aware of any changes that might cause issues.
  • When responding to support inquiries, double check your replies and make sure they are well written and typo-free. Always acknowledge inquiries quickly to make customers feel valued, and suggest a meeting or huddle if you need more clarity on their issues.
  • When customers raise support inquiries, always consider what could have been done to make the inquiry self-serve. Could adding a tooltip next to the relevant feature provide clarity? Maybe the documentation could be more detailed or better organized?
  • Document all of your notable support/findings/incidents/feature requests during on call so that it is easy to create your on call summary at the end of your on call shift.

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Resources