The Silent Holiday Wish: When You're the One Keeping the Lights On
It's Christmas morning 2025. While most people are unwrapping presents or enjoying family time, you're staring at a monitoring dashboard, hoping the green lights stay green. That Reddit post with 587 upvotes says it all: "From someone on-site today, may the phones, emails and apps stay quiet today." That single sentence captures the collective hope of every sysadmin, DevOps engineer, and SRE covering holidays. But what if quiet holidays weren't just a matter of luck? What if you could engineer them?
I've been there—covering Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving. I've watched alerts roll in while turkey cooled and champagne went flat. Over the years, I've learned that peaceful holidays aren't accidents. They're the result of deliberate engineering choices, automation strategies, and team practices that most organizations never discuss until it's too late. This isn't about eliminating on-call—that's unrealistic for most operations. This is about making on-call during holidays manageable, predictable, and yes, sometimes even quiet.
Let's explore how modern DevOps practices can transform holiday coverage from a stressful gamble into a well-oiled machine. We'll look at automation, monitoring philosophy, team structures, and cultural approaches that actually work in the real world. Because everyone deserves a peaceful holiday, even the people keeping everything running.
Why Holiday On-Call Feels Different (And Actually Is)
First, let's acknowledge something important: holiday on-call isn't just regular on-call with worse timing. The dynamics change fundamentally. Staffing is skeleton crew at best. External dependencies behave differently—payment processors have holiday schedules, third-party APIs might throttle differently, and user behavior patterns shift dramatically. I remember one Christmas Eve when our e-commerce platform saw a 300% spike in traffic between 6-8 PM as last-minute shoppers panicked. Our regular auto-scaling rules weren't prepared for that specific pattern.
Then there's the human factor. When you're the only engineer available, every alert carries extra weight. There's no quick Slack message to a colleague for a second opinion. No easy handoff if you need to step away. The mental load multiplies. One commenter in the original thread put it perfectly: "It's not the technical challenges—it's the isolation. Knowing that if something truly breaks, you're it until someone can be dragged away from their family."
But here's the thing I've learned through painful experience: these differences aren't just obstacles. They're predictable patterns you can plan for. Holiday traffic has consistent characteristics. Reduced staffing is a known constraint. The isolation factor can be mitigated with proper documentation and automation. The first step toward better holiday coverage is recognizing that it requires specific strategies, not just hoping your regular processes hold up.
Automation: Your Holiday Silent Partner
Automation isn't just about saving time—it's about creating consistency when human attention is scarce. During holidays, you want automation handling the predictable so you can focus on the truly novel. Let's talk about three automation layers that matter most during holiday coverage.
Self-Healing Infrastructure
Start with the basics: what can fix itself without you? Automated restarts of failed services, DNS failovers, load balancer adjustments—these should be table stakes by 2025. But holiday automation needs to go further. Consider implementing holiday-specific auto-scaling rules. Most cloud providers let you schedule scaling policies. Create rules that anticipate holiday traffic patterns. For instance, if you know your streaming service sees peaks on Christmas afternoon, scale up preemptively rather than reactively.
I once worked with a retail company that implemented "holiday mode" in their infrastructure. With a single configuration change, they'd adjust caching TTLs, increase database connection limits, and enable more aggressive CDN caching. The entire shift took 30 seconds and was triggered automatically based on calendar events. That's the kind of thoughtful automation that lets you enjoy your eggnog.
Intelligent Alert Routing
Alert fatigue is the silent killer of peaceful holidays. When every minor warning demands attention, you're constantly on edge. The solution isn't fewer alerts—it's smarter routing. Implement alert severity tiers that adjust based on time and staffing. During holidays, route only critical alerts (service-down, data-loss) to on-call. Route warnings and informational alerts to a holiday-specific channel that gets reviewed when normal staffing resumes.
Better yet, implement automated triage. Tools like PagerDuty and Opsgenie now offer AI-powered alert grouping and correlation. Instead of getting 50 separate alerts about related services, you get one incident with context. During one New Year's Eve coverage, this feature reduced my alert volume by 70%. That's not just convenient—it's the difference between constant interruption and actual downtime to celebrate.
Documentation That Actually Works
Here's a harsh truth: most runbooks fail when you need them most. They're outdated, assume too much context, or skip critical steps. Holiday coverage is when documentation gets stress-tested. My approach? Create "holiday edition" runbooks for common scenarios. These assume minimal context (you might be covering unfamiliar systems) and include explicit decision trees.
Even better, automate the documentation access. When an alert fires, automatically include relevant runbook links in the notification. Use automated monitoring of your documentation to ensure links stay current. I've seen teams use simple scripts that check runbook URLs weekly and alert if they return 404s. It's a small investment that pays huge dividends when you're troubleshooting alone at 2 AM on Christmas.
Monitoring Philosophy: What to Watch When You Can't Watch Everything
Monitoring during holidays requires a different mindset. You're not trying to catch every anomaly—you're trying to catch the ones that matter. This means being brutally selective about what makes it to your holiday dashboard.
Start with the "cattle vs. pets" analogy applied to metrics. During normal operations, you might monitor individual servers (pets). During holidays, monitor service groups (cattle). If one web server in a pool of twenty fails, does it really need to wake someone up? Probably not if load balancing works correctly. Adjust your thresholds accordingly.
Focus on business metrics, not just technical ones. Instead of watching CPU utilization across fifty servers, watch transaction completion rate. Instead of monitoring individual API endpoints, monitor user journey completion. One financial services company I advised switched to monitoring "successful holiday gift card purchases per minute" as their primary holiday metric. When that dipped, they knew they had a real problem affecting customers. Everything else could wait.
And here's a controversial opinion: consider temporarily disabling some monitoring during holidays. Not all of it—just the noisy, low-value alerts that generate false positives. Every team has them: the disk space alert that always fires at 85% but never matters, the memory usage warning for services that cache aggressively. Review your alert history from previous holidays. Which alerts fired but didn't require action? Those are candidates for holiday suppression.
The Human Element: Team Structures That Actually Work
Automation and monitoring are technical solutions to a human problem. But let's talk about the people side—because no amount of automation fixes toxic on-call culture.
Voluntary vs. Mandatory: The Great Debate
The original Reddit discussion revealed a split: some organizations mandate holiday coverage, others seek volunteers with incentives. From what I've seen across dozens of companies, voluntary systems with proper incentives work better for morale. But they require thoughtful design.
Successful volunteer systems often include: triple pay (at minimum), first pick of vacation time the following year, and guaranteed compensatory time off. One tech company offers a "holiday coverage bonus" equivalent to two weeks' salary for covering Christmas through New Year's. They never lack volunteers. The cost? Less than the productivity loss from burned-out mandatory coverage.
The Buddy System Reimagined
Isolation is the real killer during holiday on-call. Modern solutions go beyond "call someone if you need help." I've seen teams implement virtual war rooms—dedicated video channels that anyone on-call can join. You might be alone physically, but you can see other engineers covering their own systems. The casual conversation and shared context reduce stress dramatically.
Another approach: tiered coverage. Instead of one person covering everything, have a primary (handles urgent issues) and a secondary (available for consultation). The secondary isn't expected to be at their computer, but they're reachable for major decisions. This spreads the mental load while still respecting family time.
Post-Holiday Debriefs
Here's a practice few teams do but all should: conduct post-holiday incident reviews focused specifically on coverage experience. Don't just analyze what broke—analyze how the on-call experience felt. Was documentation adequate? Were alerts properly tuned? Did automation work as expected?
I worked with a team that discovered their holiday runbooks assumed familiarity with a legacy system that only two engineers understood. The engineer covering Christmas didn't have that context. The solution wasn't more documentation—it was simplifying the system so expertise wasn't required. That insight only emerged because they asked about the human experience, not just the technical one.
Practical Tools and Setup for 2025 Holiday Coverage
Let's get concrete. What should your holiday on-call setup actually look like? Here's a practical checklist based on what's working in forward-thinking organizations right now.
Physical and Digital Workspace
If you're covering from home (as most are in 2025), your environment matters. Invest in reliable equipment. I recommend Reliable UPS for Home Office to avoid power-related disruptions. Consider a Secondary Mobile Hotspot as backup internet—your home broadband going down shouldn't mean you can't respond to incidents.
Digitally, create a dedicated holiday profile in your monitoring tools. This should include only the dashboards and alerts that matter during reduced staffing. Use tool features like Grafana's dashboard playlists or Datadog's screenboards to create a streamlined view. Test this setup before the holiday—you don't want to discover missing permissions when you need them.
Communication Protocols
Define clear communication expectations. How quickly are you expected to acknowledge alerts? What's the escalation path if you're unavailable? Document this and share it with your family too—they need to understand when you might need to step away.
Consider creating a holiday-specific status page. Not for customers—for your own team. A simple internal page showing who's covering what, current issues, and any holiday-specific configurations. This reduces the "who do I call" panic when something unusual happens.
Automation Script Library
Maintain a curated library of holiday-tested automation scripts. These should handle common holiday scenarios: traffic spikes, third-party API degradation, backup verifications. Store them in version control with clear documentation about when and how to use them.
One pro tip: include "undo" scripts for every automation. If your holiday scaling script increases database connections, have a script that safely reduces them back to normal. Automation that's hard to reverse creates its own stress.
Common Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)
After years of observing holiday coverage patterns, I've identified recurring mistakes that turn manageable situations into nightmares.
Mistake 1: Assuming Regular Processes Will Suffice
This is the most common error. Teams run through their regular on-call handoff and think they're prepared. But holiday coverage needs specific preparation. The fix: conduct a dedicated holiday handoff meeting at least a week before. Review holiday-specific configurations, unusual schedules (like payment processor maintenance), and any known risks.
Mistake 2: Over-Reliance on Single Individuals
When only one person understands a critical system, you're creating a single point of failure. I've seen companies where the engineer covering Christmas was the only person who knew their legacy billing system. The fix: implement knowledge sharing throughout the year. Use external experts to document legacy systems if needed. Create video walkthroughs of complex troubleshooting procedures.
Mistake 3: Ignoring the Psychological Load
Technical preparation often overlooks mental health. Being on-call during holidays is isolating and stressful. The fix: build in mental health checks. Schedule a brief daily check-in with another engineer (even just a 5-minute text exchange). Use mindfulness apps specifically designed for on-call personnel. Acknowledge that it's okay to feel frustrated about missing celebrations.
Mistake 4: Failing to Learn and Improve
Every holiday coverage period generates valuable data about what worked and what didn't. Most teams just return to normal without analyzing it. The fix: schedule a post-holiday retrospective while memories are fresh. Document specific improvements for next year. This turns holiday coverage from a recurring stressor into an improving system.
Building a Culture That Values Coverage
Ultimately, peaceful holiday coverage depends on organizational culture more than technical solutions. When coverage is treated as a punishment or afterthought, even the best automation won't prevent burnout.
Leaders need to visibly value holiday coverage. This means more than just saying "thank you." It means participating in coverage rotations themselves (yes, even managers and directors). It means ensuring coverage doesn't negatively impact career progression. I've seen engineers avoid volunteering because they worried it would make them seem less committed to regular projects—that's a cultural failure.
Recognition should be meaningful and specific. Instead of generic "thanks for covering," highlight particular incidents handled well. Publicly acknowledge the sacrifice of missing family time. One company I know sends holiday coverage engineers and their families gift baskets during their compensatory time off—it acknowledges that the whole family made the sacrifice.
Most importantly, use insights from holiday coverage to improve systems year-round. If a particular failure mode only appears during reduced staffing, that's a reliability issue that needs addressing. Holiday coverage shouldn't be about heroics—it should be about systems so reliable they don't need heroes.
The Quiet Celebration: Engineering Peace of Mind
That Reddit wish—"may the phones, emails and apps stay quiet today"—doesn't have to be just a hope. In 2025, we have the tools and practices to make quiet holidays an engineering outcome. It requires deliberate work: automating the predictable, monitoring what truly matters, structuring teams humanely, and building cultures that value reliability over heroism.
I'll leave you with this thought from a senior SRE I respect: "The best holiday coverage I ever had was when nothing happened. Not because I got lucky, but because we'd engineered the luck out of the system." That's the goal. Not just surviving holiday coverage, but creating systems so resilient that coverage becomes a formality.
So to everyone covering holidays this year: may your alerts be few, your automation robust, and your celebrations peaceful. And may your quiet holiday become the expected outcome of thoughtful engineering, not just a fortunate accident.
