Lesson 5.28: On-call load and burnout, measured
Security teams fail quietly when people burn out: the best responder stops sleeping, starts ignoring pages, then resigns, taking skills the matrix said were rare. Burnout is rarely about weakness; it's usually a design problem in alerting and rotas. In Intro 301 you measured KPIs; here you measure the team's own load. In the lab you read a month of on-call pages, count load and night pages per person, measure how many pages were not actionable, find the alerts that cause most of the noise, check against Northwind's on-call policy and decide fixes that change the system, not ask people to try harder.
18 min
You will learn to
- Measure on-call load per person
- Separate night pages from daytime load
- Compute the non-actionable page rate
- Find the noisiest alerts
- Fix load with tuning and rota design
Key terms
- Page
- An alert that interrupts a person immediately, day or night.
- Actionable alert
- An alert that requires a human to do something now.
- Alert fatigue
- Becoming desensitised to alerts after too many false or useless ones.
- Rota
- The schedule of who is on call when.
- Burnout
- Exhaustion from prolonged work stress; the WHO describes it as an occupational phenomenon (ICD-11).
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