TAKES
When should it page someone at 3am?
A page is a promise that this cannot wait.
EVERYONE'S RIGHT
Every answer
AlexThe Architect“When the error budget burns fast. Symptoms, never causes.”
JoThe Cowboy“When it's on fire. Smoke can wait till coffee.”
RileyThe Minimalist“When a customer can't log in or pay. That's it.”
TaylorThe AI Native“The agent takes the page. It wakes me if stuck.”
MorganThe Threat Modeler“Any sign of an attacker. They prefer 3am too.”
ChrisThe Sovereign“When our own probe says down. Not a vendor's dashboard.”
PatThe Enterprise Adult“Whenever the contract says 99.95%. The SLA decides, not us.”
MayaThe Visionary“Only if revenue drops. Everything else can be Monday's story.”
NoraThe User Advocate“When it's slow for users. Slow is down, to them.”
HugoThe Perfectionist“Every checkout error. I'd rather wake than read the postmortem.”
RuthThe Maintainer“If nobody acted on it last time, it's not a page.”
GregThe Hedger“Route it to a digest. We can always promote it later.”
🎯 SUPER REASONABLE
Super Reasonable, the advisor who never takes a side
A 3am page spends a person, so it should be rare, believed and actionable. Page on what users feel on the paths they cannot live without, measured from outside, and send everything else to a ticket, a dashboard or a morning digest. Then review every page each week: keep the ones someone acted on, demote the rest. The goal is not fewer alerts, it is a pager nobody has a reason to mute.
- Is a user hurting right now? If not, it's a ticket, not a page.
- Can the on-call act on it? No verb, no page.
- Who checks the checker? Probe from outside, never from the system's own status page.
- Did anyone act last time? Review pages weekly and demote the ones nobody needed.
🔬 IN THE FIELD GUIDE
