On call handoff patterns

Skill ranbot-ai/awesome-skills/skills/on-call-handoff-patterns

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Effective patterns for on-call shift transitions, ensuring continuity, context transfer, and reliable incident response across shifts.

SKILL.md

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On-Call Handoff Patterns

Effective patterns for on-call shift transitions, ensuring continuity, context transfer, and reliable incident response across shifts.

Do not use this skill when

The task is unrelated to on-call handoff patterns
You need a different domain or tool outside this scope

Instructions

Clarify goals, constraints, and required inputs.
Apply relevant best practices and validate outcomes.
Provide actionable steps and verification.
If detailed examples are required, open resources/implementation-playbook.md.

Use this skill when

Transitioning on-call responsibilities
Writing shift handoff summaries
Documenting ongoing investigations
Establishing on-call rotation procedures
Improving handoff quality
Onboarding new on-call engineers

Core Concepts

1. Handoff Components

Component	Purpose
Active Incidents	What's currently broken
Ongoing Investigations	Issues being debugged
Recent Changes	Deployments, configs
Known Issues	Workarounds in place
Upcoming Events	Maintenance, releases

2. Handoff Timing

Recommended: 30 min overlap between shifts

Outgoing:
├── 15 min: Write handoff document
└── 15 min: Sync call with incoming

Incoming:
├── 15 min: Review handoff document
├── 15 min: Sync call with outgoing
└── 5 min: Verify alerting setup

Templates

Template 1: Shift Handoff Document

# On-Call Handoff: Platform Team

**Outgoing**: @alice (2024-01-15 to 2024-01-22)
**Incoming**: @bob (2024-01-22 to 2024-01-29)
**Handoff Time**: 2024-01-22 09:00 UTC

---

## 🔴 Active Incidents

### None currently active
No active incidents at handoff time.

---

## 🟡 Ongoing Investigations

### 1. Intermittent API Timeouts (ENG-1234)
**Status**: Investigating
**Started**: 2024-01-20
**Impact**: ~0.1% of requests timing out

**Context**:
- Timeouts correlate with database backup window (02:00-03:00 UTC)
- Suspect backup process causing lock contention
- Added extra logging in PR #567 (deployed 01/21)

**Next Steps**:
- [ ] Review new logs after tonight's backup
- [ ] Consider moving backup window if confirmed

**Resources**:
- Dashboard: [API Latency](https://grafana/d/api-latency)
- Thread: #platform-eng (01/20, 14:32)

---

### 2. Memory Growth in Auth Service (ENG-1235)
**Status**: Monitoring
**Started**: 2024-01-18
**Impact**: None yet (proactive)

**Context**:
- Memory usage growing ~5% per day
- No memory leak found in profiling
- Suspect connection pool not releasing properly

**Next Steps**:
- [ ] Review heap dump from 01/21
- [ ] Consider restart if usage > 80%

**Resources**:
- Dashboard: [Auth Service Memory](https://grafana/d/auth-memory)
- Analysis doc: [Memory Investigation](https://docs/eng-1235)

---

## 🟢 Resolved This Shift

### Payment Service Outage (2024-01-19)
- **Duration**: 23 minutes
- **Root Cause**: Database connection exhaustion
- **Resolution**: Rolled back v2.3.4, increased pool size
- **Postmortem**: [POSTMORTEM-89](https://docs/postmortem-89)
- **Follow-up tickets**: ENG-1230, ENG-1231

---

## 📋 Recent Changes

### Deployments
| Service | Version | Time | Notes |
|---------|---------|------|-------|
| api-gateway | v3.2.1 | 01/21 14:00 | Bug fix for header parsing |
| user-service | v2.8.0 | 01/20 10:00 | New profile features |
| auth-service | v4.1.2 | 01/19 16:00 | Security patch |

### Configuration Changes
- 01/21: Increased API rate limit from 1000 to 1500 RPS
- 01/20: Updated database connection pool max from 50 to 75

### Infrastructure
- 01/20: Added 2 nodes to Kubernetes cluster
- 01/19: Upgraded Redis from 6.2 to 7.0

---

## ⚠️ Known Issues & Workarounds

### 1. Slow Dashboard Loading
**Issue**: Grafana dashboards slow on Monday mornings
**Workaround**: Wait 5 min after 08:00 UTC for cache warm-up
**Ticket**: OPS-456 (P3)

### 2. Flaky Integration Test
**Issue**: `test_payment_flow` fails intermittently in CI
**Workaround**: Re-run failed job (usually passes on retry)
**Ticket**: ENG-1200 (P2)

---

## 📅 Upcoming Events

| Date | Event | Impact | Contact |
|------|-------|--------|---------|
| 01/23 02:00 | Database maintenance | 5 min read-only | @dba-team |
| 01/24 14:00 | Major release v5.0 | Monitor closely | @release-team |
| 01/25 | Marketing campaign | 2x traffic expected | @platform |

---

## 📞 Escalation Reminders

| Issue Type | First Escalation | Second Escalation |
|------------|------------------|-------------------|
| Payment issues | @payments-oncall | @payments-manager |
| Auth issues | @auth-oncall | @security-team |
| Database issues | @dba-team | @infra-manager |
| Unknown/severe | @engineering-manager | @vp-engineering |

---

## 🔧 Quick Reference

### Common Commands
```bash
# Check service health
kubectl get pods -A | grep -v Running

# Recent deployments
kubectl get events --sort-by='.lastTimestamp' | tail -20

# Database connections
psql -c "SELECT count(*) FROM pg_stat_activity;"

#