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Software Engineering vocabulary · Debugging and Troubleshooting

On-call

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˌɑːn ˈkɔːl/adjectiveCore term

In software engineering, on-call means: Available outside normal hours to respond quickly if an alert or incident happens. Engineers take turns being on call for their services.

In Turkish: nöbetçi, nöbette, çağrıya açık

How it is used

Written with a hyphen before a noun ('on-call engineer', 'on-call rotation') and without one after a verb ('I'm on call this week'). The on-call person 'gets paged' when an alert fires.

Example sentences

  1. I'm on call this weekend, so I'll keep my laptop with me.

  2. The on-call engineer got paged twice last night for the same disk alert.

Common collocations

  • on-call engineer
  • on-call rotation
  • be on call
  • on-call shift
  • on-call handover
  • alertAn automatic notification sent to engineers when a monitored value crosses a limit or something looks wrong, for example when the error rate is too high.
  • incidentAn unplanned event that disrupts a service or makes it worse for users, such as an outage, a big slowdown or a data problem, and that needs a quick response.
  • runbookA written step-by-step guide for handling a specific task or alert, such as restarting a service or clearing a full disk, so anyone on call can follow it.
  • SREShort for site reliability engineering: using software engineering methods to run production systems reliably. It also names the engineer who does this work.
  • postmortemA written review after an incident that explains what happened, the impact, the timeline, the root cause and the actions that will stop it happening again.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Debugging and Troubleshooting

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