Configure the on-call operations contract

You own a production AI answer platform at PagerDuty service ai-answer-prod. The goal is to build a humane rotation and a first-15-minutes response that converts actionable symptoms into ownership, mitigation, and handoff. The measurable target is SEV-1 pages acknowledge within 5 minutes, an incident commander is named within 10 minutes, mitigation begins within 15 minutes, and fewer than two non-actionable pages reach a person per shift. The known production tension is aggressive paging shortens detection but creates fatigue and attrition; wide access speeds mitigation but increases the blast radius of a tired responder.

The contract for On-call operations must survive a clean checkout. Pin tool and image versions, provide sample inputs, and fail startup on malformed configuration. The service boundary is PagerDuty service ai-answer-prod on a production AI answer platform. Before starting dependencies, list required ports, identities, secrets, storage, and cleanup steps. Use synthetic credentials and redacted fixtures; production tokens do not make a staging lab more realistic.

Create the configuration as a reviewed artifact:

service: ai-answer-prod
escalation:
  - target: primary
    timeout_minutes: 5
  - target: secondary
    timeout_minutes: 5
  - target: incident_commander
    timeout_minutes: 5
severities:
  sev1: page
  sev2: page_business_hours
  sev3: ticket

For every field, document type, valid range, default, reload behavior, and failure behavior. Numbers are incomplete without units. A timeout of 40 could mean milliseconds or seconds; a ratio of 0.005 could be a fraction or percentage. Reject unknown keys so a typo cannot silently select a permissive default. If live reload is supported, expose a configuration revision in telemetry and keep the previous valid revision for rollback.

Run the setup workflow:

./ops/oncall validate-escalation ops/oncall.yaml
./ops/oncall send-test --service ai-answer-prod --target sandbox

The expected result is not merely exit code zero. Confirm the process identity, dependency reachability, effective configuration, and one health or introspection response. Then restart the component and prove durable state remains correct. Run the setup twice to expose non-idempotent creation, conflicting ports, or duplicate policy entries. Capture the exact versions in the evidence bundle.

The production objective remains SEV-1 pages acknowledge within 5 minutes, an incident commander is named within 10 minutes, mitigation begins within 15 minutes, and fewer than two non-actionable pages reach a person per shift. Therefore setup must expose page_delivery_seconds, page_ack_seconds, incidents_total{severity}, alert_actionability_ratio, handoff_age_hours, and responder pages per shift before meaningful traffic arrives. Query each metric by its stable labels and verify an idle system is distinguishable from a broken scraper. Generate one event and check that the relevant counter changes by exactly one. Reject high-cardinality labels and ensure sensitive configuration values are redacted from startup logs.

Model a bad configuration: remove one required field, set one threshold just outside its range, and reference an unavailable dependency. Each case should fail predictably, explain the field, and avoid partial state. Next, apply the previous good revision and time recovery. A rollback that requires undocumented shell history is not a rollback plan.

The central design tension is aggressive paging shortens detection but creates fatigue and attrition; wide access speeds mitigation but increases the blast radius of a tired responder. Record the chosen default, its operational owner, and a date for reevaluation. Complete setup only after a teammate can run it from the repository instructions, produce the same effective configuration, and cleanly tear it down without affecting shared environments.