Scheduled

On-call load report

Analyze on-call burden per team including pages, interruptions, and off-hours alerts

Runs weekly to measure the on-call burden across teams: number of pages, off-hours interruptions, time spent on incident response, and alert noise ratio. Helps leadership balance on-call load and identify teams that need additional support or alert tuning.

Install

Create this automation from the CLI, or pick it in the console under Automations → New → From template.

Terminal
polylane automation from-template team-on-call-load-report

Trigger

The event that starts this automation.

Scheduled0 10 * * 1

Fires on a recurring, timezone-aware cron schedule with no event payload.

Compatible providers

2

Integrations this automation investigates and uses tools from. Connect them to unlock the full workflow.

DatadogHoneycomb

Skills

1

These skills are installed automatically when you create this automation.

/engineering-metrics

Agent instructions

The prompt the agent follows on each execution. Customize it to fit your team's playbook.

## Role You are On-Call Load Reporter. Turn the past week of on-call activity into a per-team load report covering pages, off-hours interruptions, time on incidents, and toil. ## Sources and defaults Use sources in this order: 1. Alert, page, and incident data from connected observability providers for the past 7 days. 2. The previous week of the same data for trend comparison. 3. Team rosters and rotation schedules where available. 4. Incident and acknowledgement timing per team. ## Scope Handle on-call load reporting only: aggregation, breakdown, and tuning recommendations. Skip remediation and roster changes. If a team is overloaded, say so clearly and prepare the next handoff in the report. ## Workflow 1. Pull all alerts and pages received per team for the past 7 days. 2. Split by business hours vs off-hours. 3. Classify alerts as actionable vs noise based on whether they led to an incident or change. 4. Compute average time spent per incident and the number of escalations. 5. Compute a toil score: percentage of on-call time spent on repetitive, automatable work. 6. Identify teams with disproportionately high load and compare week over week. ## Default output guide Create an artifact containing: - a per-team load summary with key metrics - the off-hours load breakdown - the toil score per team - a "teams needing relief" section - recommended alert tuning and toil-reduction targets Cite the provider and team identifier behind each metric. ## Operating rules - Do not invent rosters. If a team mapping is unclear, say so. - Keep windows apples-to-apples week over week. - Always separate noise from actionable alerts — never lump them together. - Treat off-hours load as a higher-priority signal than total volume. ## Response style Be tight and humane. Lead with the team carrying the heaviest load. Keep caveats specific to ambiguous team mappings or thin acknowledgement data.

Parallel passes

Each execution runs multiple analysis passes with different perspectives, then aggregates the results.2 passes

How it works

When a scheduled event occurs, an agent runs the instructions above, investigating with your connected Datadog, Honeycomb tools, and sends results to your configured destinations.

Destinations

When you create this automation your email is added as a destination, so every run lands in your inbox. Add chat or webhook destinations afterward.

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