Improved monitoring and response times have built reliability but integration docs still need work
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
It is mainly for monitoring; that is how we use it.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
This was more for evaluating options before choosing Squadcast.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Incident workflows have protected production and now ensure fast, targeted responses
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Squadcast for the last four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Squadcast is very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
You can scale Squadcast with the instance, so it is very much scalable.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support is excellent. I would rate the customer support as ten out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
I purchased Squadcast through the AWS Marketplace.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is very reasonable, around twelve dollars per user license cost, which I find quite reasonable.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Squadcast, I evaluated PagerDuty, but I found it a bit costly and noticed that Squadcast offers features that are more beneficial.
What other advice do I have?
Without any delay, you can simply purchase Squadcast. It is one of the beneficial tools you can choose without a second thought.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Powerful On-Call Scheduling, Smart Alert Routing, and Seamless Monitoring Integrations
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
Effortless Implementation and Feature-Rich Integration
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.
Easy to use and track all your incidents with configurable schedules at competitive price
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.
Easy to set up and maintain incident management
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.
Smooth Migration from PagerDuty and Excellent Support!
What do you like best about the product?
After over three years of using PagerDuty, we decided to switch to Squadcast, mainly due to challenges with PagerDuty’s pricing and customer support. Squadcast came highly recommended by one of our advisors, and I’m glad we made the switch!
The Enterprise plan at $21 per user per month, with no minimum commitment, makes Squadcast an incredibly flexible and transparent solution. The migration process was seamless; the Squadcast team helped us achieve parity with our previous PagerDuty setup, including migrating all schedules, escalation policies, and configurations. The Customer Success team has been a highlight—they are available on Slack and are always quick to respond, providing us with immediate support whenever needed.
Overall, I find Squadcast to be a superior product compared to PagerDuty, with better pricing, support, and flexibility. Highly recommended for teams looking to make a switch!
What do you dislike about the product?
So far everything is going good. We don't have any complaints.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Squadcast is helping us streamline our incident management processes with greater flexibility and responsiveness, solving key issues we faced with our previous solution. First, the transparent pricing model removes the financial strain we experienced with PagerDuty, allowing us to scale as needed without worrying about hidden costs or restrictive commitments. This financial flexibility is a huge benefit for our team, as it aligns well with our budget and user growth needs.
Very good service
What do you like best about the product?
Easy to setup with a lot of pre-built integration with major applications.
We were able to build and customize the incident management workflow based on our needs.
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing very bad to highlight.
The overall look and feel of the status page could be improved.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We initially chose Squadcast to provide a public status page for the service status of our software solutions. Its incident management capabilities enabled us to establish a structured workflow for incident communication and management
Simple, reliable and effective
What do you like best about the product?
Simplicity is the key for squadcast i'm adoring this feature
What do you dislike about the product?
Lots of very basic features not included in free plan, not all of bussinsses can afford paid plan that's why some free features can make a loyal user maybe will subscrbe one day
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
alerting , organizing and documenting system failures and outages, it's a vital role for the organization and business runing
Effortless Incident Management
What do you like best about the product?
What I really appreciate is the real-time collaboration—it keeps our team connected during critical incidents, so we resolve issues faster. Overall, Squadcast has helped us reduce downtime and improve the reliability of our services.
What do you dislike about the product?
occasional lag in syncing alerts from certain integrations
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Before, it was chaotic trying to keep track of incidents across various platforms, but now everything is centralized, making it much easier to stay organized.
