Squadcast

Positive

My main use case for Squadcast  is as an incident management tool where our entire alerting system operates. We receive alerts in Squadcast  and route them to different escalation policies and teams based on alert category, with each team taking appropriate action according to the alert.

A specific example of how I use Squadcast for incident management involves setting an escalation policy within the alert. Whenever the alert triggers, we receive a quick call based on the escalation policy. Once we receive the call over the phone, we respond back to the Squadcast ticket. Based on the severity of the Squadcast ticket, we raise a bridge call if there is production impact. If the severity is around warning level, we take the required action accordingly.

Squadcast serves as our incident management platform with our alerting system based on GitOps principles. Via Alertmanager, we receive alerts based on thresholds we have set. Once a threshold is breached, we get the alert notification from Alertmanager, which triggers to Squadcast incident via a Squadcast webhook configured in Prometheus. Based on different alert categories, we have different sets of actions for which we have set escalation policies. We also use a roster within Squadcast.

In Squadcast, the best features include the ability to add notes, different images, and files inside incident notes and tickets. We have set up monthly roster via script within Squadcast. We have also configured escalation policies for our N number of microservices, which redirects the alert based on particular teams. We use sets of workflows within Squadcast and have a suppression rule feature in which we can suppress respective alerts during maintenance windows. We have configured N number of services based on our production environments. In Squadcast, we can configure multiple webhooks based on Squadcast integration with multiple tools.

Out of the features I mentioned such as incident notes, monthly roster, escalation policies for microservices, suppression rules, and integrations, we find ourselves using integration the most. We have configured Squadcast with Grafana , Alertmanager, Prometheus, and for application-side alerting, we have configured it with New Relic . On a daily basis, we are using escalation policies. We can download tickets based on filters we have set, which is one of the features in Squadcast. We can download weekly and monthly reports. We also have automation based on tagging within Squadcast.

Based on tagging, I can add that you can create routing rules for alerts based on the tag you have created. A particular team can be routed based on a filter. If you are aware of the filter, we have a payload within Squadcast. Based on payload and uniqueness, we can create a tag and route the respective alert to the respective team.

While using Squadcast, I notice that it positively impacts my organization because we can get timely notifications over email and phone via Squadcast, and we can respond timely to the alert based on severity.

This improvement helps in creating uptime as we achieve an uptime above 99.2%. MTTR and MTTA increase based on timely notifications via Squadcast.

In Squadcast, I want to note that if you want to add tagging based on P0 and P1 incidents, you cannot do that on the alert because that particular feature requires purchasing the enterprise region. The medium version only allows two workflows. Inside the workflow, you can add only one kind of priority. Additionally, there is no P0 severity tag within Squadcast.

Regarding needed improvements, when creating deduplication rules, if multiple same types of alerts trigger in Squadcast due to Alertmanager and we have ten services, we need to create deduplication rules over ten services. It would be beneficial if we could add a deduplication rule in one service and have it also work for another service. This would save a lot of time.

I have been using Squadcast for the last four years.

Squadcast is very stable.

Squadcast's scalability is also impressive. If you need to create a Squadcast account for a new joiner, you can directly add a user, and the new user can verify the account by getting an email response and updating their phone number within Squadcast.

Customer support is very good. You can ping in Squadcast and get support via Google Talk or whatever tool you are using for meetings. They will immediately respond and fix your problems if you face any.

Previously, we used PagerDuty and switched to Squadcast because Squadcast offers multiple automations. We have added tags, and based on a tag, we can route alerts, which was lacking in PagerDuty. Additionally, we can automate the roster in Squadcast, which is why we switched.

For Squadcast, we are using AWS  as our cloud provider.

The team responding to Squadcast alerts should not be able to manually resolve those alerts until the alert is fixed from the service owner.

I have seen a return on investment because if the system is down, there is a loss of lots of revenue. By purchasing Squadcast, we timely monitored our infrastructure, received alerts, and got timely solutions for those system metrics.

The pricing is good, and we have a set pricing model based on the number of users.

Before choosing Squadcast, we evaluated multiple options, but some of them did not have as many features as Squadcast. That is why we chose Squadcast.

My advice to others looking into using Squadcast is to definitely go for Squadcast because you get most of the features compared to other incident management tools. From a pricing point of view, it is quite reasonable. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS)

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.