Over the years, I have found the following reports most valuable for On-Call owners to prepare:
- Number of incidents per week per team — useful for a regular weekly review.
- Number of people who had incidents in the last month, quarter, or six months.
- Number of people who had incidents at night in the last month, quarter, or six months.
- Total hours people spent on-call in the last six months.
- Postmortem tooling can provide another set of reports, but your pager software should give you the most insight into how people are doing.
Other reports help you spot outliers. You can identify when something isn’t working or is trending in the wrong direction. Early on, you may have too many incidents; years later, you may face the opposite problem — too few, meaning engineers are losing practice. If some people only face incidents for part of the year, you should invest more in game days and training.