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A Glossary of Terms

Escalation

Many on-call policies have multiple tiers. An escalation is when a call-out is passed to the next tier. This may happen deliberately, or by policy.

Network Operations Center

Also known as a NOC, these are often staffed 24/7. Implementations vary by organization, but these often take the place of first-line on-call. Employees in the NOC are often shift-workers. Typically found in either old organizations where the NOC is a remnant of the old 'machine room' days, or large organizations that can afford the coverage costs.

Postmortem

A process to answer a few basic questions:

  • What went wrong?
  • Why did it do that?
  • What can we do to make it not do that again?
  • How can we detect this better in the future?

Overrides

A term used in on-call scheduling software to describe the process of shift-swapping, or applying a small change to a schedule. If someone needs to take the pager for 4 hours of a 36 hour shift, this is accomplished through an override in the software.

Shift swapping

Exchanging shifts with another employee. This is often done through negotiations, especially near holidays and summer vacation season. See also, Overrides.