Squadcast

My main use case for Squadcast  is for monitoring. In our team, we have a group of engineers and developers, so we usually schedule monitoring with Squadcast  turn by turn. Each person goes to Squadcast to monitor what is happening, take a look at the logs, information, and if there is anything that needs addressing, we do it.

It is mainly for monitoring and if necessary, taking action.

For our use case, Squadcast has what we needed; probably they could have more, but for our use case, we got what we need.

It depends on the project; I have worked with other companies that use other products too, but for this particular company where we use Squadcast, I think Squadcast was our main, our primary product for monitoring. So there was not a switch per se, but in other companies, I have worked with different, similar tools too.

I could say a lot about the best features Squadcast offers. In our use case, the features that stand out to me the most are the alerting and incident reporting because with that, we are able to know there is an issue. We go there, take a look, and if necessary, we adjust or we fix it.

I think Squadcast helps us to build a better product because of the alerting. Squadcast helped us build a better product by improving both response time and reliability.

Response time improved by up to 50%, and reliability improved too because we are able to identify something and fix it. That improves a lot too, let us say up to 60%, because our product became more scalable.

Squadcast does the job, especially alerting, reliability, and monitoring, so we can reliably use Squadcast for those things.

I think the areas where Squadcast can be improved include the alerting, the integration part, and especially the documentation while we are integrating.

The documentation and integration should be improved. I remember when we were working on the integration, the documentation was not great, and we found it difficult to understand what the document was saying in some parts. So I believe that both should be improved, especially the documentation.

I do not think there are any other improvements needed for Squadcast that I have not mentioned yet, or if there are, I do not remember for now.

Managing permissions and access control with Squadcast is not 100% straightforward; I remember our manager has to configure that to give access to each team member. I thought even that could be improved a little bit, but from my point of view, access control was pretty cool, and it was fine too because you are sure that you have the needed permission you need to do your job.

It is mainly for monitoring; that is how we use it.

Squadcast is stable.

I think Squadcast is scalable; I believe it is stable, scalable, and stable, but in our use case, we do not really go far in terms of scalability.

It was fine; but in our case, I do not think we have a lot of communication with customer support because it was not necessary. Most of the time, the integrations and everything was going well, so we did not have a reason to escalate any complaints. But for customer support, I would say it was good, although I do not have a lot of interaction with them personally.

This was more for evaluating options before choosing Squadcast.

It was not difficult for our team to onboard and start using Squadcast; I think it is mainly because the people involved are engineers who are used to that. So it was easy.

The learning curve for Squadcast for new team members is easy; I remember in my own case when I started using it, having not used it before, I did not find it difficult to use or even do the integration, so it was straightforward.

It was seamless how Squadcast integrates with our existing tools or systems, and we did not face any real challenges.

For collaboration during incidents, we use Slack for communication among the teams. Usually, in some cases when we receive an alert, someone responsible, like the developer, will call or most of the time go to the dashboard, take a look, investigate, and if necessary, create a ticket for that, so it depends. Mostly what we use in collaboration with Squadcast was Slack.

I think money was saved since we have seen a return on investment. Another thing is fewer employees are needed to do things because after the integration, a lot of work has been reduced; you just go there, check, monitor, and if action is needed, we take the action.

I did not do those things directly in terms of pricing, setup cost, and licensing; my manager handled those things, so I was not worried about this. My main concern was more like integration and monitoring, doing the main job, in terms of pricing, which was the responsibility of my manager and other team members.

I cannot say for sure if we purchased Squadcast through the AWS Marketplace  because it was our manager that handled that part. Our part is more like integration and monitoring using it.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would say Squadcast deserves a seven, which is my overall review rating for the product.

My advice for others looking into using Squadcast is to go ahead and use it because it is a good product.

Squadcast is a good product for monitoring, alerting, and observation. So it is a good thing, and if you have a need for that, you can go for it.

Squadcast  serves as our main notification channel. As a notification channel, Squadcast  has significantly helped us by implementing alerts in our production system, such as alerts for disk usage, CPU spikes, or any down alerts, which we configured on Alertmanager.

Regarding our main use case, we use Squadcast webhooks and recently created a status page using Squadcast, which includes SLA and escalation policies.

Squadcast's best features include the ability to add multiple persons in a shift at the same level, along with providing webhooks to receive alerts.

Squadcast has positively impacted our organization because we are confident that we will not miss any alert or system outage, as Squadcast ensures the alert reaches the person even if the SRE person is not available.

This reliability has significantly impacted our team's response time, allowing us to redirect alerts directly to the respective microservice team owners' mobile phones, thus saving time during production alerts.

Before Squadcast, we had a larger SRE team of 18 members, which we reduced to 9 after implementing Squadcast, allowing us to utilize the remaining team in other departments.

Squadcast could enhance the UI to be more user-friendly. I also noticed a bug, though I do not recall the exact details.

I have been using Squadcast for approximately four years.

Squadcast is indeed stable.

Squadcast's scalability is good, and I have not faced any challenges in scaling it.

Squadcast's customer support is very good, as they are always ready to help whenever we experience an outage.

Before Squadcast, we were using PagerDuty for alerts, although I do not have much exposure to PagerDuty.

Regarding the webhook integration, the setup is straightforward. We created services for different regions and generated a webhook for Signoz.

I advise others looking into using Squadcast to take advantage of more features by creating escalation policies to redirect alerts to the specific service owners of the impacted service to save time.

Having used Squadcast for the last four years, I am truly familiar with it and rely on Squadcast completely for our production system and its outages. If Squadcast is down for some time, it becomes very challenging for us to check the alerts. I would rate this product an 8.