Hi Folks!

I’m on call for Incident Command here at PagerDuty part of this week, and I was wondering if you have a ritual or process for what you do when those alarms go off. 

I confess, after having been on call for various types of production systems over the years, that my first stop after ack’ing an alert is to stop in the bathroom - if you need to or not, just like Mom used to tell you on road trips. Then I make sure I have a beverage. The call might be long and require a bit of talking, so I want to have something to drink. 

Then I’m ready to go after that incident for however long it takes. Fortunately our incidents at PagerDuty aren’t nearly as bad as some I’ve been in for past jobs, where calls would run so long the battery would run out on my phone. But it pays to be prepared!

What do you need to get you through an incident? I’d love to hear what keeps you going. 

--mandi