on-call-best-practices

on-call-best-practices is a skill for Claude Code from latestaiagents/agent-skills. It costs 77 tokens per session (1,626 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to organizing on-call rotations, where engineers take scheduled responsibility for responding to service problems and alerts.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design primary and backup rotations, schedule handoffs, define escalation roles, and improve the on-call process.
Why use it?
It helps distribute the workload fairly, reduce burnout, and make handoffs clear when responsibility changes.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the devops-sre plugin — 8 skills, 6 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it to design primary and backup rotations, schedule handoffs, define escalation roles, and improve the on-call process.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/latestaiagents/agent-skills/on-call-best-practices
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add latestaiagents/agent-skills --skill on-call-best-practices
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/latestaiagents/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install devops-sre, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills, 6 commands.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for on-call-best-practices

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/latestaiagents/agent-skills/on-call-best-practices/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/latestaiagents/agent-skills/on-call-best-practices)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/latestaiagents/agent-skills/on-call-best-practices"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/latestaiagents/agent-skills/on-call-best-practices/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for on-call-best-practices

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/latestaiagents/agent-skills/on-call-best-practices"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/latestaiagents/agent-skills/on-call-best-practices.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 77 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,626 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00077 $0.01626
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00813
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00325
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00163

Measured 8d ago against content hash 95904ee6a677, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

on-call-best-practices scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/devops-sre/skills/on-call/on-call-best-practices/SKILL.md · 281 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 281 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

On-Call Best Practices

Sustainable on-call that protects engineers and keeps systems reliable.

On-Call Philosophy

"On-call should be a learning opportunity, not a punishment."

Core Principles

  1. Fair distribution - Burden shared equally
  2. Sustainable pace - No burnout
  3. Clear expectations - Everyone knows their role
  4. Continuous improvement - Learn from every incident

Rotation Design

Recommended Structure

Primary On-Call (24/7):
- First responder for all pages
- 1 week shifts (max)
- Clear handoff process

Secondary On-Call (24/7):
- Backup if primary unavailable
- Can be shadow for training
- Steps in if primary overloaded

Business Hours Escalation:
- Subject matter experts
- Available for complex issues
- Not paged at night

Rotation Schedule Example

Week    Mon    Tue    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Jan 6   Alice  Alice  Alice  Alice  Alice  Alice  Alice
Jan 13  Bob    Bob    Bob    Bob    Bob    Bob    Bob
Jan 20  Carol  Carol  Carol  Carol  Carol  Carol  Carol
Jan 27  Dave   Dave   Dave   Dave   Dave   Dave   Dave
Feb 3   Alice  ...

Secondary follows same pattern, offset by 1 week

Scheduling Guidelines

Guideline Recommendation
Shift length 1 week max, shorter if high volume
Gap between shifts 2+ weeks minimum
Consecutive nights Comp time if >2 pages
Holidays Volunteer-based, compensated
Team size 4+ people for sustainable rotation

Response Expectations

Response Time SLAs

Severity Acknowledge Respond Escalate If
SEV1 5 min Immediate No ack in 5 min
SEV2 15 min 30 min No ack in 15 min
SEV3 1 hour 4 hours Business hours
SEV4 Best effort Next day N/A

What "On-Call" Means

During your shift:
✓ Phone charged and with you
✓ Laptop accessible within 15 min
✓ Reliable internet access
✓ Not impaired (alcohol, etc.)
✓ Able to focus if paged

You are NOT expected to:
✗ Be at your desk 24/7
✗ Respond instantly to Slack
✗ Fix everything yourself
✗ Work normal hours + on-call

Read the full file on GitHub · 281 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 281 lines · 77 tokens per session scan A 95904ee6a677

Subscribe to this mod's changes

on-call-best-practices is a skill published in the GitHub repository latestaiagents/agent-skills (5 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 77 tokens to every session and 1,626 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.