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When should it page someone at 3am?

When should it page someone at 3am?“When it's on fire. Smoke can wait till coffee.”Jo Ramirez, The Cowboy

💡 WHY JO IS RIGHT

A 3am page costs a person's sleep, their judgment the next day and, eventually, their willingness to stay on call. Most of what alerts at night is smoke: a disk at 80%, a slow job, a retry storm that resolves itself. Production makes a real fire obvious, because users can't do the thing. Save the pager for that, and handle everything else with a clear head after breakfast.

✅ RIGHT WHEN

Most issues self-heal and real fires are unmistakable when they happen.

🚩 TOO FAR WHEN

The smoke was a disk filling up, and at 7am it is a fire with no space left to write logs.

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