DFR Checklist

The Developer First Responder, DFR, is a rotating on-call role responsible for monitoring system health, triaging issues, and serving as the first point of contact for operational concerns related to the Invoicing Platform Service, IPS. This rotation typically lasts one week. Additional responsibilities include facilitating team standups, responding to internal support requests, and documenting incidents and resolutions.

Table of Contents

Quick Reference

Scenario Steps
Got paged? Check #ips-signals → Review observability dashboard → Escalate to #ips-dev if needed
Service down? Check audit logs → Post in #ips-signals before restarting → Document incident
Support question? Answer if possible → Tag SME if unsure → Add to standup parking lot if unresolved
End of rotation? Close ticket → Update handoff notes → Brief incoming DFR on Monday

Get Started

Complete the following steps to setup for success:

  1. Create a DFR-tracking ticket
    • Project: Financial Systems
    • Component: IPS
    • Labels: DFR, IPS, Invoicing, NO-QA
    • Workflow: In-Progress
    • Tip: clone the previous week’s DFR-tracking ticket to use as a template
  2. Attend Handoff meeting
    • Usually Monday morning, Google calendar title - “IPS-Ops Handoff”
    • Discuss open issues and incomplete work with outgoing DFR
    • If not on the calendar, request access from team lead
    • Note: This meeting is optional - coordinate with outgoing DFR
  3. Document the work
    • Add comments to the DFR-tracking ticket to record completed tasks
    • Use judgment on what’s worth documenting to reduce noise
    • Include support channel Q&A to share knowledge with the team
  4. Wrap-up the week
    • Close the DFR-tracking ticket
    • Update any incomplete investigations for the incoming DFR
    • Prepare notes for the next IPS-Ops Handoff meeting

Daily Responsibilities

Time Tracking: all team members must log time in Jira against the current week’s DFR-tracking ticket for any DFR-related work, log time for -

  • Facilitating or delegating tasks to others
  • Addressing production issues
  • Identifying, asking, or answering questions
  • Investigations, reporting, and verification
  • Incident remediation

Standup Facilitation: run the team’s Kanban board during daily standups, present any overnight and/or updates for ongoing issues, and discuss any issues allocated to the parking lot

System Monitoring

Email monitoring is not necessary, as all Invoicing system alerts, including those administered by Datadog and PagerDuty, should route to the primary monitoring Slack channels -

Channel Purpose Action Required
#ips-signals System health alerts and anomalies Investigate, document findings, escalate if needed
#finsys-alerts Cross-system financial alerts Monitor for IPS-related issues
#support-ips Internal user support requests Respond or route to the SME, subject matter expert
#support-general General technical support Monitor for IPS-related questions
#incident-alerts New incident tickets Triage issues tagged with IPS components

Secondary Monitoring: more #finsys-* channels may be relevant depending on integrations and dependencies; refer to the IPS Onboarding documentation for a complete list

Dashboard Checks: while Slack alerts should cover critical issues, occasional dashboard checks can help identify trends; check the Observability Dashboard for irregular patterns in service metrics and the SLO Dashboard to review daily service availability

Investigation Best Practices

Focus on work items that improve operational stability and reduce future incidents. Triage tasks by impact - production issues first, quick wins (answer any <5 minute questions), and set expectations for non-urgent requests. Communication is key – close any feedback loops opened.

Handling Health Check Outages: services may experience brief outages due to network issues or infrastructure changes and when investigating, check the audit logs first - remember that any outages recovering in <10 minutes typically don’t require deep investigation, but document any patterns of short, repetitive outages

Before Restarting Services:

⚠️ Always communicate before manually restarting any service -

  • Post a brief note in #ips-signals or #ips-dev before proceeding
  • For QA environments, notify the QA team to avoid disrupting active testing
  • For Production restarts, communication is required

Escalation Path:

  1. Document investigation in #ips-signals
  2. Tag/ping relevant team members for additional perspective
  3. If urgent and/or unresolved, escalate to #ips-dev
  4. Add open questions to standup parking lot

Mid-Month Tasks

Code Freshness Review: monitor code freshness emails, usually titled “[Action Required] Some of your applications/libraries are stale or at-risk of being stale”, review flagged services and libraries, approve and merge outstanding library updates, and coordinate with the team if major updates are needed

Known Issues: mid-month spike in queued messages metric is expected and related to database and IO-Poller performance; this typically resolves within an hour and will be addressed in the database migration

MIP Tasks

MIP, the last couple of days of each month, are a heightened monitoring period, ensure to:

  • Increase monitoring frequency, hourly checks instead of daily
  • Prioritize invoice processing and financial close activities
  • Be available for urgent fixes

Refer to the Invoicing Reference Guide for comprehensive information; key points include -

  • Code Freeze Protocol: Hot fixes for MIP issues are exempt from standard code freeze
  • Approval Process: Hot fixes don’t require pre-approval, but must be tracked
  • Communicate: Post all MIP deployments in #finsys-freeze-approvals
  • Coordinate: Include broader Financial Systems teams as needed

Note: FFEH is a practice documentation site created for portfolio purposes; while the patterns and approaches reflect real-world engineering practice, the onboarding materials below are fictional

Essential Resources:

  • How to Create and Maintain API Keys
  • How to Retry Failed Invoice Requests
  • Developer First Responder Process
  • Getting Ready for On-Call (PagerDuty Setup)

Reference Materials:

  • IPS Onboarding Guide
  • IPS Architecture Overview
  • Incident Response Playbook
  • IPS Runbook

Calendars & Schedules:

  • IPS DFR Rotation Calendar
_Last updated: [2026-02-02] Maintained by: IPS Team @ Fake Company, Inc._

© 2026 Fake Company, Inc. | This is Rhyannon Rodriguez's portfolio project with fictionalized content.

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