How to Do On-Call Handoffs Right

Most on-call handoffs take about 30 seconds. That's because most shifts end with nothing dramatic happening. Your replacement shows up, you say "all quiet," and you're done. That's the ideal scenario.

But when there is something to hand off, whether it's an ongoing incident, a weird pattern you noticed, or just context about what broke recently, the quality of that handoff matters. A good handoff saves your replacement hours of confusion. A bad one guarantees they will ping you at midnight asking what you meant.

What Actually Needs to Be Passed Along

The goal of a handoff isn't to dump your entire shift's worth of knowledge onto the next person. They don't need to know about every Slack message or every graph you looked at. They need to know what's actionable.

Here's what belongs in a handoff:

Active incidents or degradations. If something is on fire or smoldering, that's priority one. Include what's happening, what you tried, what worked, what didn't, and where you left off.

Recent fixes or changes. If you deployed a hotfix, restarted a service, or made a configuration change during your shift, mention it. Sometimes fixes take a while to fully propagate, and your replacement needs to know what normal looks like after your changes.

Patterns or anomalies. If you noticed error rates creeping up, latency spikes at odd times, or anything that feels off but isn't alert-worthy yet, pass it along. Context like this helps the next person recognize when a small issue becomes a big one.

Upcoming maintenance or known issues. If there's planned work that might trigger alerts or if a vendor is having an outage that's affecting your systems, mention it. Nobody wants to scramble investigating an alert that was expected.

How to Document a Handoff

For simple shifts, a quick Slack message in your team's on-call channel works fine. For anything more complex, use a handoff template. Here's one that works:

On-call handoff - [Your Name] -> [Next Person]
Shift: [Date/Time Range]

Status: [All clear / Active issue / Monitoring situation]

Active Issues:
- [Issue 1]: [Status and next steps]
- [Issue 2]: [Status and next steps]

Recent Actions:
- [Time]: [What you did]
- [Time]: [What you did]

Notes:
- [Any context or patterns worth knowing]

You don't need to use this exact format. The point is structure. When someone is coming onto shift, they shouldn't have to parse a wall of text to figure out what's happening.

What Makes a Bad Handoff

The worst handoffs are vague. Saying "there were some issues earlier but they're resolved now" is useless. What issues? How were they resolved? Will they come back?

Another common mistake is over-explaining. You don't need to walk through your entire debugging process. Your replacement doesn't need to know that you thought it was a database issue but then realized it was actually a misconfigured load balancer after checking twelve different dashboards. Just tell them what the problem was and how you fixed it.

And finally, don't skip the handoff just because nothing happened. A 30-second message confirming that everything is quiet is valuable. It tells the next person they can trust the silence instead of wondering if they missed something.

Keeping Handoff Overhead Low

Some teams over-engineer handoffs. They create elaborate documents, hold 15-minute sync meetings, or build custom tooling for passing context. That's overkill unless you're running a massive operation with dozens of on-call engineers.

For most teams, a Slack message or a shared doc is enough. The key is consistency. If everyone on the team uses the same format and posts in the same place, handoffs become routine.

And if your handoffs are consistently long and complicated, that's a sign of a different problem. Maybe your monitoring is unclear, or your runbooks are incomplete, or your alerts are too noisy. Fix those issues, and your handoffs get simpler.

The Handoff Is Part of the Job

Some engineers treat handoffs as optional or an inconvenience. They're not. A good handoff is part of being a reliable teammate. It takes two minutes and can save the next person hours of pain.

If you're handing off an active incident, stay reachable for a bit after your shift ends. You don't need to stay glued to your laptop, but if your replacement has a quick question, answer it. That's just professional.

And if you're the one receiving a handoff, read it carefully and ask questions if something is unclear. Don't assume you'll figure it out later. Five minutes of clarification now beats an hour of confusion at 3am.