IT On-Call Directions & Expectations
Expectations
- On-call rotation begins outside of regular Freshservice business hours of 7am - 5pm.
- Every technician is assigned a weekly rotation.
-
COVERAGE: If you're not able to be on-call a specific day during your week, find another tech to cover your day(s) and let Andrew know.
- Monitor downtime in PRTG.
- Stay alert to email/push notifications for Urgent or High-priority tickets.
- Communicate to IT Manager, RDO and office PM when necessary.
Prepare for being on-call
- Download the Freshservice smartphone app
- Enable notifications for the Freshservice app
- You will receive push notifications for Urgent or High priority tickets that come in after hours.
- To restrict Freshservice app notifications to only on-call tickets:
- Launch the app > Browse to More > Settings > Notifications
- Turn on "receive on-call alerts" and "allow alerts even in DND mode"
- Turn off all other notifications
- Download the PRTG smartphone app
- Download Microsoft Teams smartphone app
- Enable notifications for ServiceBot. It will be a chat window.
- ServiceBot will send you a Teams message if an Urgent/High priority ticket is opened after hours.
- You will also receive a text message notification for any High urgency tickets.
See the on-call schedule:
Freshservice web portal > My Work > On-Call Calendar
Phone app > Browse to More on bottom menu bar > Shifts
What is an Urgent/High priority ticket?
Anything that prevents patient care.
Network/server downtime.
Escalations
There is always an Engineer and IT Manager on call available for questions or escalations.
To view:
In Freshservice web portal browse to My Work > On-call calendar
Select "Who's on-call now?"
Secondary on-call: Engineers
Tertiary on-call: IT Management
Scenarios
This outlines several "what if" scenarios you might encounter while on-call.
It's impossible to cover every situation that happens while on-call. Use your best judgement and focus on providing a high level of customer support.
Scenario 1
You receive a ticket stating a user cannot access their email.
Answer:
- This can likely be resolved during normal business hours.
Scenario 2
You receive a ticket that a user cannot log onto their laptop to perform after-hours work.
Answer:
- Use your best judgement. Does this user normally work after hours? Does this affect patient care?
- If the user normally works outside of business hours you should assist immediately.
- Communicate to the user over the ticket asking if they are performing urgent work or if this can wait until normal business hours to resolve.
Scenario 3
In PRTG an office's Cato firewall is down, thus network communication for the rest of the office is down.
Answer:
- Perform normal network troubleshooting. Can you ping the firewall?
- Open a ticket and monitor the downtime.
- Keep in mind that ISPs will sometimes perform maintenance outside of normal business hours or on weekends.
- If the network does not come back within a reasonable amount of time, communicate to the regional IT field tech that their office is down and requires a site visit. Assign them the ticket.
- Send a text message to the office PM and RDO stating we are aware of the downtime and their IT field tech will be onsite the next day to address the problem.
Scenario 4
In PRTG an office's server is offline.
Answer:
- Perform normal troubleshooting. Can you ping the server? Can you remote into it?
- Open a ticket and monitor downtime of the server. If you are unable to bring the server up, contact the regional IT field tech and mention they will need to be onsite to resolve this issue and assign them the ticket.