Squadcast

Squadcast  is my main tool for incident management where we receive our application side and infrastructure side alerts, which are set up using GitOps and monitoring tools like Prometheus. Whenever the threshold breaches, it reaches Squadcast , our incident management tool. Based on the severity, we acknowledge and start working on the basis of severity inside Squadcast.

A specific example of an incident where Squadcast helped my team manage things is whenever our production running environment where VMs are running experiences any disk threshold set to greater than 90%. Whenever disk utilization exceeds 90%, an alert triggers directly from Alertmanager to Squadcast, and within a minute, we start acknowledging the alert and take the required action based on the alert notification via Squadcast. In Squadcast, we receive notifications via email, SMS, and phone.

Inside Squadcast, there are multiple features such as escalation policies, routing, and suppression lists, so it helps us with different microservices and microservice teams. Whenever a service-specific alert triggers, it reroutes via tagging and routing rules in Squadcast to the right team based on escalation policies. Apart from this, if we have maintenance or any planned activity, we can suppress the alerts and make the service in maintenance mode so that we no longer receive noise.

You can also add suppression policies in Squadcast. For example, if you're using Redshift and inside Redshift there's a particular time window during which maintenance mode is active, you can suppress Redshift-related alerts during that time. There are numerous services, and if you're creating any maintenance or other activities, you can simply put Squadcast service into maintenance mode. Also, there are workflows where, for example, if you have a severity-critical alert, you can tag it as a P1 in the workflow.

One of the best features Squadcast offers is the ability to manage your environment based on services, allowing you to create numerous services. Squadcast integrates with multiple tools, allowing configuration via webhook to Prometheus, New Relic , and various Amazon services, including AWS . You can also connect with other tools like New Relic  via webhook, and you can simply configure it in Squadcast service. Furthermore, based on your service, you can create numerous escalation policies, and according to these policies, you will receive notifications. In Squadcast, we have a payload, and based on the payload, you can easily create a tag and route the alert to the respective team.

The tagging and routing features have helped my team significantly because tagging and routing alerts based on microservices teams ensures that the alert reroutes to the respective team without causing noise for other teams. This process helps in timely acknowledgment of the alert, and there is a lesser chance of missing the alert because we already receive notifications multiple times via phone call, SMS, and email.

Squadcast impacts my organization very positively because within a minute, I receive notifications, allowing timely acknowledgment of alerts, and based on severity, we can take the required actions, which impacts MTTA and MTTR. It helps in acknowledging and mitigating production issues. It is one of the beneficial tools.

In Squadcast, if a team member manually resolves an alert that is not addressed within a specific time domain, they handle any duplicate alerts by manually resolving those. Currently, there is an option to add notes and resolve that particular alert, but there should be a restriction based on hierarchy regarding who can manually resolve alerts so that not every team member can do so.

The UI is good, but sometimes during the addition of escalation policies, there is a slight increase in response time in Squadcast, showing some lag while adding and editing those escalation policies.

I have been using Squadcast for the last four years.

Squadcast is very stable.

You can scale Squadcast with the instance, so it is very much scalable.

The customer support is excellent. I would rate the customer support as ten out of ten.

Positive

I purchased Squadcast through the AWS Marketplace .

We save a lot of money by managing incident responses timely before any production system goes down. By acknowledging alerts promptly and receiving them quickly, we can mitigate issues in a timely manner, which saves costs and improves user experience for our clients when services are functional.

The pricing is very reasonable, around twelve dollars per user license cost, which I find quite reasonable.

Before choosing Squadcast, I evaluated PagerDuty, but I found it a bit costly and noticed that Squadcast offers features that are more beneficial.

Without any delay, you can simply purchase Squadcast. It is one of the beneficial tools you can choose without a second thought.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS)

What do you like best about the product?

On-call scheduling/rotations
Alert routing intelligence
Incident response workflows
Integrations with monitoring tools

What do you dislike about the product?

Workflow inefficiencies
Support or documentation issues

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

On-call scheduling/rotations
Alert routing intelligence
Incident response workflows
Integrations with monitoring tools

What do you like best about the product?

easy to implement and use. Has mutiple features and easy to integrate.

What do you dislike about the product?

Present cloud version has no issues at all.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Able to instantlycapture incident request with a minum number of key input, cross validating IT asset details works like a charm and provides ample details for a drill down into respective owner of incident and relating asset within inventory.

What do you like best about the product?

Very clean UI and menu. Dasbhoard to give quick view of current status/active incident

What do you dislike about the product?

So far based on my uses cases, I did not find anything which i would say is missing or have to be different.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We were looking for incident management based on user that we wanted to have account for and Squadcast have all the features that we wanted to start with also the price was within budget.
Since we implemented, all the incident which needs to be taken care on priority are now getting right attention and visibility, also team members get calls and escalation policy helps further that if call is missed by one person then it goes to other and so on.
Which at the end gets acknowledge and team start to work on it or assign to appropriate team after basis analysis.

What do you like best about the product?

Squadcast helps us respond to incidents in our software promptly, before they become a significant issue for our users. Squadcast can take inputs from various monitoring tools that we have and its easy to set up rotas and overrides for who should be alerted for different types of issues.

What do you dislike about the product?

With multiple rotas set up, it can be sometimes difficult to read the schedules screen for who is on-call in different rotas.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Squadcast alerts us to issues occurring in our production software. This helps us to keep our customers happy by responding to issues promptly.