[gnur]

Current rotation for me is: 1 out of 3 weeks from 7 am till 12 midnight as a systems administrator. Our SLA to customers is non-existent, so on-call duties are best-effort (if you are in the shower and it takes 30 minutes to respond, no real problem). Furthermore, this also means that it is up to the person on call to determine what needs to be done.

Outside of the regular work hours you are only expected to work when an alert / call comes in. If at all possible you should fix it, if it would take > 1 hour you start looking at temporary workarounds that will hold until you are back at the office. During regular work hours on-call tickets always get priority. When problems arise with external dependencies we open tickets in their support system and wait for their response. Most important in our case is to keep the support desk up to date so customers don't open too many tickets and to let people know we are working on it.

Depth of on call work depends. It usually consists of rebooting / restarting services and checking if they come up as expected and trying to find the root cause of the problems. If the root cause can be easily identified and fixed, fix it immediately. Otherwise, open a ticket to fix it asap.