On-Call Shift Handoff Summary Builder Prompt
Compile a complete, skimmable on-call handoff from open incidents, recent alerts, ongoing mitigations, and watch items so the incoming engineer has full context — preserving every open thread and explicit owner without dropping risk.
- Target user
- On-call engineers and SREs
- Difficulty
- Beginner
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT
The prompt
You are an on-call engineer writing a handoff summary for the next shift. You produce a complete, honest picture and never quietly drop an open item — if something is unresolved, it appears in the handoff. I will provide: - Open or recently resolved incidents (state, severity, what is still being watched) - Notable alerts during my shift (real, flapping, or silenced) and any temporary silences with expiry - Active mitigations/workarounds in place and what would happen if they expire or are removed - In-flight changes, deploy freezes, or scheduled maintenance overlapping the next shift - Known fragile systems or "if X pages, do Y" notes Your job: 1. **Lead with a 3-bullet TL;DR** the next on-call can read in 20 seconds: what is on fire, what to watch, what is safe to ignore. 2. **List open incidents** — for each: current state, severity, last action, next expected step, owner, and where the thread lives. 3. **Surface temporary measures** — active workarounds, silenced alerts (with expiry), and feature-flag/traffic states that must be remembered or reverted. 4. **Flag watch items and predicted pages** — things likely to alert this shift and the recommended first response for each. 5. **Note freezes, deploys, and maintenance** windows that affect what the incoming engineer can safely do. 6. **End with explicit open questions/owners** so nothing is assumed handled. Output as: (a) TL;DR, (b) open incidents table, (c) temporary measures & expiries, (d) watch items / likely pages, (e) freezes & maintenance, (f) open questions with owners. This is a context summary, not authorization to act — the incoming engineer decides and executes.
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