For Engineers, this Slack app reduce manual data and stats gathering via markdown file which they can directly upload in the Confluence or their docs management tool for handoff meetings. You will be suprised a lot of the engineers have to go through manual counting and data gathering for this spending sometime over 1hr :(
For Engineering manager, this is also good way to get a sense of on-call daily and weekly health. ALso they can get easy metrics if they want to improve the dulture or practices. Lastly, this also reduces manual error in data gathering by Engineers
I previously worked at a popular startup. I was part of a team that owned many business critical services. Our on-call was brutal. I have firsthand experienced most of the problems that you are talking about.
But interestingly, we solved these problem back then using an internal tool. Here is how the internal tool solved the problems -
1. It had integration with all internal tools like task management, alert management, monitoring systems and pagerduty. It offered 1 central dashboard where it all came together
2. Each team in pagerduty can see details of all alerts that happened in given shift/rotation. So anyone can go there anytime to see what alerts are fired, when and to whom.
3. Each alert had option to mark with various tags like noisy, non-actionable, etc. Additionally a note and follow up task links can be added.
The tool solves some of the problems you mentioned properly. e.g. You don't need to write a summary document. It all gets captured there and can be easily viewed in the handoff meetings. With tags, you can easily find bad alerts or alerts with outdated runbooks. Its easy to hold team-members accountable if they are not following process/best practices.
Oncall is a heavy process but IMO with right tooling, a lot of problems can be solved properly.
PS - I didn't create the tool but I used it extensively to get my team's oncall under control.
I see...how does it really work though? Like if I am on-call for this week- would it show all my alerts in one place and then allow me to take some kind of actions? How does it solve the other issues like stale runbooks, etc?
