Templates · Engineering
On-call handoff template
What the next on-call needs to know
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Filled example
The template filled in for a made-up company, so you can see what good looks like.
On-call handoff: payments platform, week 31
From: Kenji Watanabe · To: Amara Nwosu · Shift: 2026-07-27 to 2026-08-03
Shift at a glance
Incidents this shift
| Time |
Summary |
Severity |
Resolved? |
| Tue 02:14 |
Card authorizations failing for one acquirer (INC-2412) |
SEV2 |
Yes, acquirer fixed a certificate |
| Fri 16:40 |
Payout batch delayed 40 minutes by a stuck lock (INC-2419) |
SEV3 |
Mitigated, root cause open |
Ongoing issues
- INC-2419 root cause is not found. If the payout batch is late again, kill the lock holder with the runbook step in PAY-RB-07 and post in #payments-incidents.
- Webhook relay lag has crept from 20 seconds to 70 seconds at peak (PAY-1044). Not paging yet; the alert fires at 120 seconds.
Pages & noise
| Alert |
Count |
Action |
| PaymentsAPIHighLatency |
6 |
Needs tuning: fires on single slow requests, threshold change in PAY-1046 |
| DiskUsage80 on ledger-db-2 |
4 |
Fine to keep muting until the volume resize on Tuesday |
| AcquirerErrorRate |
3 |
Escalate if it repeats, linked to INC-2412 |
| CertExpiry30d |
1 |
Ticket PAY-1050 filed, cert renews on 2026-08-20 |
Upcoming risky changes
- Tuesday 10:00: ledger-db-2 volume resize (Leo Marchetti), expect a 30 second failover
- Wednesday: new fraud rules ship behind a flag at 10% traffic, owner Sofia Lindqvist
- Thursday: Fernhill Goods runs a flash sale, roughly 3 times normal checkout volume
Follow-ups
The template
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On-call handoff
From: [your name] · To: [name] · Shift: [date] to [end date]
Shift at a glance
The numbers the next on-call checks first. Compare against the previous shift.
Incidents this shift
| Time |
Summary |
Severity |
Resolved? |
|
|
|
|
Ongoing issues
Anything unresolved that could page the next shift. Link the ticket, don't just describe it here.
Pages & noise
| Alert |
Count |
Action |
|
|
Fine to keep muting / needs tuning / escalate if it repeats |
Upcoming risky changes
Deploys, migrations or experiments landing soon that could explain a weird alert.
Follow-ups
Questions
- How long should a handoff take to read?
- Under five minutes, link out for detail
- What goes in Ongoing issues versus Follow-ups?
- Ongoing issues can page the next shift, follow-ups are work that cannot
- Should I hand off in person too?
- Yes for anything at severity 2 or higher, the doc is the record and the conversation is the transfer
Fill it with your agent
Connect Claude to reph over MCP, then paste this. The draft arrives as suggestions you accept or reject section by section. How to connect Claude.
Find my reph doc "On-call handoff" with search_docs, then read it with read_doc. Fill the shift numbers, Incidents and Pages and noise from this shift's alert history, incident channel and pager log, and Upcoming risky changes from the deploy calendar. Link tickets instead of retelling them. File it with suggest_edit, one replace_section op per section (heading line kept) so each can be accepted alone. Ask each open question (alerts you could not classify) with add_comment quoting that section's heading line, then call request_review with a one-line summary.
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