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When should it page someone at 3am?

When should it page someone at 3am?“Whenever the contract says 99.95%. The SLA decides, not us.”Pat Williams, The Enterprise Adult

💡 WHY PAT IS RIGHT

When customers pay for an uptime commitment with a response time, paging is not an engineering preference but a contractual obligation. The SLA defines what counts as an incident, how fast someone must respond and what it costs if they don't. A supported paging tool, a written rotation and an escalation path turn that promise into something auditable, which is exactly what the customer bought.

✅ RIGHT WHEN

Enterprise contracts with uptime credits and response-time commitments.

🚩 TOO FAR WHEN

The free tier got the enterprise SLA template too, and the rotation pays for it nightly.

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