All of this seems pretty standard, but I found the decision to wake both on-call people at the same time to be interesting. I like the idea of making PagerDuty (really, whoever put the policy in place, so - your manager) responsible for both being awake at 3am, rather than forcing one sleepy and sympathetic human to have to decide whether to wake up a colleague in the middle of the night for some help. But, if you really mean to do paired on-call you pretty much have to do it this way. Otherwise you have back-up, rather than a pair.
You still need an escalation path, though. You don’t have to have PagerDuty buzz more and more (presumably higher-ranking) people until one responds, but there has to be someone to call in the case it becomes a major fire - especially anything very customer visible, like, the DB crashed and we lost the last 6 hours of data, we’re double-counting events, we can’t process credit cards…
All of this seems pretty standard, but I found the decision to wake both on-call people at the same time to be interesting. I like the idea of making PagerDuty (really, whoever put the policy in place, so - your manager) responsible for both being awake at 3am, rather than forcing one sleepy and sympathetic human to have to decide whether to wake up a colleague in the middle of the night for some help. But, if you really mean to do paired on-call you pretty much have to do it this way. Otherwise you have back-up, rather than a pair.
You still need an escalation path, though. You don’t have to have PagerDuty buzz more and more (presumably higher-ranking) people until one responds, but there has to be someone to call in the case it becomes a major fire - especially anything very customer visible, like, the DB crashed and we lost the last 6 hours of data, we’re double-counting events, we can’t process credit cards…