Monday, 8:02 AM. Your on-call week starts, and the only message from the last shift says "all good, a few alerts, nothing major." Twenty minutes later the same alert fires again, and you have no idea what "nothing major" covered.
Fact-checked against the official sources on 23 October 2026.
A handoff note is the short message the person finishing an on-call shift leaves for the person starting the next one. On call means you are the one who gets paged (alerted) when a service breaks. In one team's story in Google's SRE Workbook, the on-call rules covered both ends of a shift: read the handoff from the previous shift at the start, and email a handoff to the next engineer at the end.
The note does not need to be long. Five lines cover most weeks.
Fill in the five lines
- Now: anything still broken or still being worked on. Say "nothing open" if that's true, so the reader doesn't have to guess.
- Paged: what woke you up, and what you did about it. One clause per page is enough.
- Changed: anything you changed during the shift. Think deploys (releases of new code), config edits, and silenced alerts. A silence mutes an alert for a set time, so write when it ends.
- Watch: something that hasn't broken yet but might. A disk filling up, a slow job, a flaky test.
- Ask: the one question you couldn't answer, and who might know.
Read a filled-in example
Here's a note for a made-up "bus-times" app that shows when the next bus arrives.
Now: nothing open.
Paged: 02:14 "api latency high" x2. Cache node restarted, latency normal by 02:30.
Changed: muted "cache-node-down" until 12:00 today. Unmute or extend it.
Watch: timetable import ran 40 min last night (usually 15). Disk at 81%.
Ask: why the cache node keeps restarting. The team that owns the cache may know.
You can read that in under a minute. You know what's calm, what's muted and when the mute ends, and which problem is worth a ticket today.
Keep it honest
Two habits make the note worth trusting:
- Don't write "transient" and stop there. The SRE Workbook warns that waving off a page as transient lets the same bug page the next person. If you didn't find the cause, write "cause unknown" on the Ask line.
- Write it before you log off. It takes two minutes while you still remember. The next morning it's guesswork.
Where this fits at DevGrid Staffing LLC
DevGrid Staffing LLC is an IT staffing company, and SRE and DevOps groups are among the teams it hires for. In that hiring, a short, clear handoff note is the kind of everyday habit that shows a person can be trusted with a pager.
One thing to try today
Open your team's last handoff message. Rewrite it in the five lines above and see which line was missing.
Written at the DevGrid Staffing LLC workbench for people on SRE and pipeline teams · devgridstaffing.com
