Overview
A rapidly growing B2B SaaS platform serving enterprise customers across multiple time zones faced a critical challenge: their 8-person DevOps team was experiencing severe on-call burnout. Manual scheduling processes, excessive alert noise, and lack of workload balance had led to two engineer resignations in six months. The team needed a sustainable on-call model that maintained operational coverage while protecting engineer wellbeing.
Results at a Glance
| Metric | Before Upstat | After Upstat | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-call pages per week | 45 per person | 16 per person | 65% reduction |
| False positive rate | 45% | 8% | 82% reduction |
| Sleep disruption | 4 hours per week | 1.5 hours per week | 62% reduction |
| Team satisfaction score | 3.2 out of 5 | 4.6 out of 5 | 44% improvement |
The Challenge
The platform team had grown from supporting a single product to managing a complex distributed architecture serving customers in 15 countries. On-call responsibility had become the primary driver of engineer dissatisfaction and attrition.
The team used Excel spreadsheets to manually coordinate on-call schedules. This process consumed two hours weekly and resulted in frequent errors. Some engineers received disproportionate weekend and holiday assignments. Others were paged during approved vacation time. The lack of automation made it nearly impossible to achieve fair workload distribution across the team.
Alert volume compounded the scheduling problems. Engineers on call averaged 45 pages per week, with a 45 percent false positive rate. Many alerts fired for transient issues that resolved themselves or represented monitoring configuration errors rather than genuine incidents. The constant interruptions disrupted sleep an average of 4 hours per on-call week, degrading both health and incident response quality.
The cumulative stress led two experienced engineers to resign within six months, explicitly citing on-call burden as the primary factor. Their departures increased rotation frequency for remaining team members from weekly to every 3-4 days, accelerating the burnout cycle. The team faced an urgent need to implement sustainable on-call practices before losing additional engineers.
How Did Upstat Solve the On-Call Burnout Problem?
The team implemented Upstat to address three fundamental problems: unfair manual scheduling, excessive alert noise, and lack of workload visibility. Upstat replaced manual spreadsheets with automated schedule generation using fair distribution algorithms. These algorithms balanced shift assignments across team members, ensuring no engineer carried disproportionate weekend, holiday, or overnight burden.
Automated holiday integration eliminated the problem of vacation-time pages. The team configured roster-wide exclusions for company holidays and maintenance windows. Individual engineers set personal time-off periods that automatically advanced rotation to the next available person. The override system enabled temporary shift swaps without permanently modifying the base schedule, supporting flexibility for personal circumstances without manual coordination overhead.
Intelligent alert management dramatically reduced notification volume. Upstat applied anti-fatigue rules including deduplication within configurable time windows, priority-based rate limiting, and intelligent alert grouping. Related alerts consolidated into single notifications rather than generating separate pages for each symptom. Maintenance window suppression prevented alerts during planned work. Multi-region monitoring reduced false positives by distinguishing partial service degradation from complete failures.
Priority-based routing ensured critical alerts reached engineers immediately while lower-priority notifications batched into daily digests. Quiet hours configuration protected sleep schedules, routing non-critical alerts to email during overnight periods. This combination of fair scheduling automation and intelligent alert suppression addressed the root causes of on-call burnout while maintaining operational reliability.
What Was the Implementation Process?
The team completed deployment in four weeks through a phased approach that maintained continuous operational coverage.
Week one focused on monitor setup and alert rule configuration. The team migrated existing health checks from their legacy monitoring tools into Upstat, configuring appropriate alert thresholds based on historical incident data. They established priority levels for different alert types, designating critical alerts for customer-facing outages and lower priorities for warning conditions. Multi-region monitoring configuration reduced false positives by requiring failures in multiple geographic locations before triggering alerts.
Week two addressed on-call roster creation. The team built their 8-person rotation using the fair distribution algorithm, which automatically balanced weekend and holiday assignments. They configured roster-wide holiday exclusions based on the company calendar and imported existing vacation schedules as individual time-off periods. The override system enabled engineers to trade shifts, providing flexibility without requiring manual schedule modifications.
Week three involved team training and parallel running. Engineers learned the Upstat interface for viewing schedules, acknowledging alerts, and managing personal availability. The team ran both the old Excel-based system and Upstat concurrently, validating that automated scheduling matched expected coverage patterns and that alert routing delivered notifications to the correct on-call engineer. This parallel operation identified and resolved minor configuration issues before cutover.
Week four completed the full transition. The team decommissioned their Excel scheduling process and legacy monitoring integrations. They configured Slack integration for alert delivery and established quiet hours policies. Engineers reported immediate relief from schedule management overhead, which dropped from two hours weekly to approximately 15 minutes for occasional override adjustments.
What Results Did the Team Achieve?
On-call pages dropped from 45 per week per engineer to 16 per week, a 65 percent reduction. Alert deduplication eliminated redundant notifications for the same underlying issue. Intelligent grouping consolidated related alerts that previously generated separate pages. False positive suppression removed alerts for transient problems that resolved before engineering intervention. The remaining 16 pages represented genuine incidents requiring human response, improving both engineer focus and incident response quality.
Sleep disruption decreased 62 percent, from an average of 4 hours to 1.5 hours per on-call week. Quiet hours configuration prevented non-critical alerts during overnight periods. Priority-based routing ensured that engineers received immediate notification only for customer-impacting incidents. Multi-region monitoring reduced false alarms from transient network issues. Engineers reported significantly improved sleep quality, which translated to better cognitive performance during actual incident response.
Team satisfaction scores increased from 3.2 out of 5 to 4.6 out of 5 in the six months following implementation. Exit interviews and team surveys identified on-call burden as the primary satisfaction improvement factor. Fair distribution algorithms eliminated the perception of scheduling unfairness that had driven earlier resentment. Automated holiday and vacation protection demonstrated organizational respect for personal time. Zero engineers resigned for on-call-related reasons in the six months after implementing Upstat, compared to two resignations in the prior six-month period.
The team also gained operational benefits beyond burnout reduction. Automated scheduling eliminated two hours weekly of manual coordination overhead. Real-time schedule visibility provided instant clarity about coverage, preventing incidents from falling through gaps due to unclear on-call assignment. The override system simplified shift swaps from multi-email coordination threads to single-click operations. These efficiency gains freed engineering time for proactive system improvements rather than reactive schedule management.
Key Takeaways
Automated schedule generation with fair distribution algorithms eliminated the scheduling unfairness that had been a primary burnout driver, ensuring balanced workload across the entire team without manual coordination overhead.
Holiday integration and individual time-off management protected personal time through roster-wide exclusions and automatic rotation advancement, demonstrating organizational respect for engineer wellbeing that improved retention and morale.
Intelligent alert suppression reduced pages by 65 percent through deduplication, priority-based routing, and correlation rules, while simultaneously improving incident response quality by eliminating false positive distractions.
Multi-region monitoring distinguished partial degradation from complete failures, reducing false positive alerts by 82 percent and ensuring engineers were only paged for genuine customer-impacting incidents.
The combination of fair scheduling automation and alert quality improvements reduced sleep disruption by 62 percent, protecting cognitive performance for both on-call response and regular development work.
Reduce On-Call Burnout in Your Team
Implement automated scheduling, fair rotation algorithms, and intelligent alert suppression to improve engineer wellbeing while maintaining operational excellence.