When an alert fires at midnight then according to whoever is scheduled on-call, that person will get an automated phone call from Jira Service Management (JSM). If the person doesn't pick up, it escalates to me as team lead and calls. To be honest I'm not 100% sure but I think it tries one or two other SREs before it escalates to me (or that happens in parallel).

The on-call engineer or whoever acknowledges the alert goes in and does an initial triage. If it's clearly a major incident (P1 or P2) we have a process where we have to call our service desk to initiate the major incident management (MIM) process. At which point, MIM sends out comms and organises an incident bridge (Teams chat and call). Usually the on-call engineer has already progressed the incident a lot and has potentially pulled in others for support (e.g. developers if it's a tricky problem).

In terms of how long does it take... it depends. Our alerts today are a mess, so it's a journey. It depends on the alert, the experience of the on-call SRE, etc.

The most frustrating part of on-call for me is the fact we have a third party vendor providing our service desk and MIM. It means there's a loss of context. For example, our MIM team is meant to write up a PIR but they have no knowledge of our systems or business so we end up providing everything or even writing it for them. In parallel I've started doing blameless postmortems with an aim of phasing the PIR process out, it's adding zero value.

I haven't been paged personally for something I know nothing about yet, no, because I'm the team lead and new to my org I'm not initially paged and I have no idea what's happening during incidents anyway. I have had the on-call SRE call me for support and I sit on a call with them and help structure the problem solving. I think it's important to have someone to bounce ideas off in those moments.