Two Functions, One Goal
When production systems fail, two questions need immediate answers: Who gets paged? And how does the team coordinate a response?
These questions address different concerns. The first is about availability—ensuring someone is ready to respond when alerts fire. The second is about coordination—organizing people and activities to resolve the issue efficiently.
Many organizations conflate these functions, leading to confusion about responsibilities, unsustainable workloads for a few individuals, and gaps in coverage or coordination. Understanding how on-call and incident response complement each other creates clearer expectations and more effective incident management.
What On-Call Actually Means
On-call is a scheduling mechanism. It designates specific team members as responsible for responding to alerts during defined time windows. When monitoring systems detect problems, they page whoever is on-call for the affected service.
The on-call engineer is the first responder. Their job is triage: assess what happened, determine severity, and decide next steps. Sometimes that means fixing a simple issue directly. Other times it means escalating to specialists, paging additional responders, or declaring a formal incident.
On-call rotations distribute this first-responder burden across team members. Effective rotations consider:
Coverage requirements: Does this service need 24/7 availability, or just business hours response?
Rotation frequency: How often does each engineer take on-call duty? Weekly rotations with one week per month per person prevent burnout.
Primary and secondary responders: Having backup coverage ensures no single point of failure and provides escalation paths when the primary needs help.
Time-off handling: Systems should automatically advance rotations when someone is on vacation or unavailable.
The key insight: being on-call means being available to respond if paged, not actively working or monitoring dashboards constantly. If your organization expects constant vigilance during on-call shifts, that is a management problem, not standard on-call practice.
What Incident Response Actually Means
Incident response is a coordination framework. It defines how teams work together when issues exceed simple fixes—organizing investigation, communication, decision-making, and resolution activities.
Unlike on-call, which focuses on initial alerting and triage, incident response encompasses the full lifecycle from detection through resolution and learning. This includes:
Role assignment: Who coordinates the overall response (incident commander)? Who investigates technical issues? Who handles stakeholder communication? Who documents activities?
Communication structures: Where do responders collaborate? How do status updates flow to stakeholders? What cadence of updates is expected?
Decision frameworks: Who has authority to make critical decisions? What escalation paths exist when decisions need executive input?
Documentation practices: How is the timeline captured? What information feeds post-incident review?
Incident response teams may include the on-call engineer, but often expand to include additional technical experts, communication specialists, and cross-functional participants depending on incident scope and severity.
How They Work Together
The relationship between on-call and incident response is sequential and collaborative, not competitive.
The Handoff Point
On-call engineers perform initial triage when alerts fire. For simple issues—a restart fixes the problem, a configuration change resolves the alert—they handle resolution directly without formal incident coordination.
When issues prove more complex, the on-call engineer transitions from sole responder to participant in a broader response. They might:
- Escalate: Page additional engineers with specialized expertise
- Declare: Formally create an incident record to trigger coordination protocols
- Transfer: Hand coordination responsibility to an incident commander while continuing as technical responder
This handoff represents the boundary between on-call and incident response. The on-call engineer remains involved, but the coordination framework expands to include additional structure and participants.
Ongoing Collaboration
During active incidents, on-call engineers often serve as primary technical responders while incident commanders handle coordination. This separation of concerns allows engineers to focus on debugging without also managing stakeholder updates and resource coordination.
The on-call engineer brings critical context: they received the initial alert, performed first-pass investigation, and understand the timeline of events. This knowledge informs the broader response.
Meanwhile, incident response structures ensure:
- Multiple investigation paths can proceed in parallel
- Stakeholders receive regular updates without interrupting technical work
- Decisions get made without waiting for consensus
- Activities are documented for later review
After Resolution
Post-incident, both functions contribute to learning. On-call experience informs alerting improvements—were alerts actionable? Did they provide enough context? Incident response experience informs process improvements—did coordination flow smoothly? Were the right people involved?
Common Patterns and Anti-Patterns
Pattern: Integrated Ownership
Teams that build and maintain services also staff on-call rotations and participate in incident response. The backend team handles backend incidents, the database team handles database incidents.
Works well when: Teams have sufficient size for sustainable rotations, clear service boundaries exist, and response skills are distributed across team members.
Watch for: Knowledge concentration in a few individuals, rotation frequency that leads to burnout, inconsistent response quality across teams.
Pattern: Centralized Coordination
A dedicated team handles incident coordination across the organization while service-owning teams provide on-call coverage and technical expertise.
Works well when: Organizations are large enough to justify specialized coordination roles, consistent response quality matters across all services, and cross-service incidents are common.
Watch for: Coordination team becoming a bottleneck, service teams losing incident response skills, context loss between coordination and technical response.
Anti-Pattern: Hero Culture
The same few engineers handle every significant incident because they have the most knowledge or are perceived as most capable. On-call schedules technically rotate, but escalations always land on the same people.
Why it fails: Burns out your best engineers, creates organizational risk when heroes leave, prevents knowledge distribution.
Fix it by: Documenting hero knowledge, pairing less experienced responders with experts, rotating incident commander responsibilities, celebrating successful responses by non-heroes.
Anti-Pattern: On-Call as Incident Response
Treating on-call as the complete incident response function—expecting the on-call engineer to handle everything alone regardless of complexity.
Why it fails: Complex incidents require multiple perspectives and skills, coordination overhead distracts from technical investigation, single individuals burn out rapidly.
Fix it by: Defining clear escalation triggers, establishing formal incident response structures for significant events, training teams on when to escalate versus handle directly.
Anti-Pattern: Response Without On-Call
Having incident response capabilities but no formal on-call coverage. Alerts go to shared channels hoping someone notices and responds.
Why it fails: Diffusion of responsibility means no one feels accountable, response times vary wildly depending on who happens to be watching, nights and weekends have no guaranteed coverage.
Fix it by: Establishing formal on-call rotations, ensuring alerts page specific individuals, defining coverage requirements for each service.
Designing for Your Organization
The right balance between on-call and incident response depends on organizational size, system complexity, and operational maturity.
Small Teams (Under 10 Engineers)
On-call and incident response often merge into a single function. The on-call engineer handles most issues directly, escalating to colleagues for complex problems. Formal incident commander roles may feel like overhead.
Focus on: Sustainable rotation frequency, clear escalation paths for complex issues, documentation for knowledge sharing.
Medium Teams (10-50 Engineers)
Separate on-call rotations by service area become valuable. Incident response structures help coordinate multi-team issues. Define when issues warrant formal incident declaration versus direct handling.
Focus on: Service ownership clarity, incident severity definitions, cross-team coordination protocols.
Large Organizations (Over 50 Engineers)
Specialized roles become practical. Consider dedicated incident coordinators, formal incident commander rotations, and explicit handoff protocols between on-call and incident response.
Focus on: Consistent response quality across teams, efficient escalation paths, systematic learning from incidents.
Integration Points
Effective incident management requires on-call and incident response to share information seamlessly.
Schedule visibility: Incident response tools should show who is currently on-call for affected services, enabling quick identification of relevant responders.
Alert context: When on-call engineers escalate issues, alert details and initial investigation findings should transfer to the incident record.
Participant tracking: Incident records should capture who responded, including the on-call engineer who performed initial triage and any additional responders who joined.
Escalation integration: On-call escalation policies should connect to incident response workflows, ensuring escalations trigger appropriate coordination structures.
Modern incident management platforms provide these integrations, connecting roster management with incident coordination to reduce context switching and manual handoffs.
Building Sustainable Practice
Neither on-call nor incident response works sustainably without deliberate design.
For on-call: Limit rotation frequency to prevent burnout. One week per month per person is a reasonable target. Provide appropriate compensation for availability. Reduce alert noise so pages represent real issues requiring human attention.
For incident response: Define roles clearly so responders know their responsibilities. Establish communication patterns so information flows where it is needed. Conduct post-incident reviews so the organization learns from every significant event.
For both: Invest in training so engineers feel confident responding. Document procedures so response does not depend on tribal knowledge. Measure performance so you know what needs improvement.
Final Thoughts
On-call and incident response answer different questions but serve the same goal: resolving issues efficiently while maintaining team sustainability.
On-call ensures someone is always available to receive alerts and perform initial triage. Incident response ensures teams can coordinate effectively when issues require more than individual effort.
Organizations that understand this complementary relationship build clearer expectations, more sustainable workloads, and more effective incident management. Those that conflate the functions often struggle with confusion about responsibilities and burnout among their most capable engineers.
Start by clarifying which function each process serves. Define on-call coverage for services requiring guaranteed response. Establish incident response structures for issues requiring coordination. Design the handoff between them deliberately. Measure and improve both continuously.
The result: teams that respond quickly to alerts, coordinate effectively during complex incidents, and learn systematically from every failure.
Explore In Upstat
Manage on-call schedules and coordinate incident response with integrated tools for rotation management, participant tracking, and team collaboration.