Produces a complete on-call shift handoff note - shift summary, open incidents, watch items with paging thresholds, silenced alerts, in-flight changes, and escalation contacts - checked against a completeness checklist. Use when someone asks "write my on-call handoff", "what should I tell the next on-call", "my shift ends in an hour, help me hand over", or "make a handoff template for our rotation". Do NOT use for writing the incident postmortem after resolution - use postmortem-writer instead. For live severity assessment during an incident, use sev-triage; for external customer-facing incident comms, use status-page-update.
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name: On-Call Handoff
description: Produces a complete on-call shift handoff note - shift summary, open incidents, watch items with paging thresholds, silenced alerts, in-flight changes, and escalation contacts - checked against a completeness checklist. Use when someone asks "write my on-call handoff", "what should I tell the next on-call", "my shift ends in an hour, help me hand over", or "make a handoff template for our rotation". Do NOT use for writing the incident postmortem after resolution - use postmortem-writer instead. For live severity assessment during an incident, use sev-triage; for external customer-facing incident comms, use status-page-update.
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# On-Call Handoff
A handoff note transfers your mental model, not just your ticket queue. The incoming engineer should be able to respond to the next alert without asking you anything - because at 3am, "ask the previous on-call" is not an option, and the most expensive handoff failure is the one-line "quiet shift, nothing to report" that omits the silenced alert or the half-finished migration that pages them four hours later.
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: Gather the shift's raw material
Pull these before writing - memory alone misses exactly the items that matter:
1. Paging history for the shift: count and severity of pages.
2. Open or partially resolved incident tickets.
3. **Every alert you silenced, snoozed, or downgraded** - from the monitoring system, not memory. A silenced alert with no expiry is a landmine.
4. All deploys, config changes, migrations, and infra changes in the last 24 hours - including other teams' changes to shared systems if you know of them.
5. Anything in flight: fixes pending review, vendor tickets open, scheduled maintenance windows.
### Step 2: Write the note in this fixed order
The order is deliberate: the reader triages the note the same way they triage a page - summary first, active fires second, smoke third.
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