Squadcast

I primarily use Squadcast  for monitoring purposes, and alerts are received inside the incident management tool where rosters are created based on rotation schedules. Based on the rotation and escalation policies, alerts are redirected to different microservices according to the escalation policy. Additionally, the SRE roster is managed within Squadcast , which contains multiple shifts, so the roster is created according to shift timings.

Squadcast offers multiple features, including the ability to create escalation policies. When working with twenty or more teams, twenty escalation policies can be created and alerts can be routed to a particular microservice team based on the escalation policy. The shift roster of the SRE team can be managed because they work in different shifts, and their roster can be managed inside Squadcast. Alerts can be deduplicated inside Squadcast, which suppresses a lot of noise.

Deduplication is one of the multiple features inside Squadcast that helps reduce noise from false alerts. Additionally, routing and deduplication rules are available, as well as suppression rules. For example, if planned maintenance is occurring, alerts can be suppressed during that time window. Rosters can be managed, escalation policies can be created, notes can be added inside Squadcast incidents, and the tool can be integrated with numerous tools using webhook API integration.

All of the features are relied upon, but the roster is mandatory, and escalation policies are important. Squadcast's routing feature is relied upon primarily. Labels inside the alerts allow alerts to be routed to the respective microservices team based on those labels, which is something the team relies on.

Squadcast has positively impacted the organization by allowing timely receipt of alerts. Based on those alerts, notifications are received via email, SMS, and phone calls, so the SRE team responds according to the severity of the alerts. Numerous labels exist inside the incident, which allows timely actions to be taken based on the label, whether critical or warning, helping minimize downtime by responding promptly to particular incidents.

By taking timely actions on alerts, MTTR and MTTA have been improved, which minimizes downtime and allows for effective incident response.

Sometimes, while updating the escalation policies tab, Squadcast takes a lot of time, which could be improved. Most of the time when escalation policies are being updated, it takes too long, which is considered one of its drawbacks. Additionally, when adding a tag inside a Squadcast incident, there is no P0 option available; there is only P1 to P5, and it would be beneficial to have a tag related to P0 as well.

I have used Squadcast for the last five years.

Squadcast is very stable.

Squadcast is very scalable.

Squadcast has excellent customer support.

Previously, PagerDuty was used, but their UI is not user-friendly and it is costly, which is why the switch to Squadcast was made.

A significant return on investment has been seen because incidents can be tracked timely and actions can be taken that minimize downtime. On the customer side, there are financial transactions involved, and continuous downtime could result in a loss of revenue for both the client and the organization. If many transaction-related costs are encountered and a lot of downtime occurs in the production environment, it leads to definite revenue loss. Using Squadcast allows incidents to be tracked and timely actions to be taken, which minimizes downtime and leads to substantial cost savings related to revenue.

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is very affordable and not as pricey as other tools. There is no cost related to setup and licensing, making it very affordable.

Other options have not been evaluated; the search for an incident management tool led to Squadcast. Numerous tools are available, but based on price perspective and use cases, Squadcast fit the organization well, which is why it was chosen.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Our main use case for Squadcast  is for alerting purposes, where we have set up alerting in our prod and non-prod environment, and we are getting alerts for infra and application-level alerts into Squadcast  management tool, and we manage SRE shift rotations in Squadcast.

A quick specific example of how Squadcast helps with alerting or SRE shift rotations in our environment is that we have a rotation every month, so we have set up a roster inside Squadcast, and based on the roster, the person who is in the shift gets the alert notification with the help of Squadcast's roster.

Our main unique use case is receiving sets of alerting and alert notifications based on the incident trigger to Squadcast. Apart from this, we have set up multiple use cases inside Squadcast, such as setting up services based on our environment, and we have integrated Squadcast with the help of webhook API with other tools like Prometheus and Grafana . We have set up deduplication rules and suppression rules, so if there's a maintenance of any tool and we know that we are getting alerts during that time frame, we have suppressed the alerts during that window with the help of Squadcast incident management tool.

The best features that Squadcast offers for our team include email, SMS, and over the phone notifications, and apart from it, we can maintain escalation policies based on different microservices teams, and we can also add route rules; for instance, if a service alert is related to Team A, we can directly route the alert to Team A, which helps in managing alerts in Squadcast. We can make the service on maintenance mode if we have any planned activities, and we can deduplicate alerts to suppress the noise by adding deduplication rules, while also being able to track activities related to alerts and adding primary analysis over Squadcast note of the particular incident.

Our team uses deduplication and routing features effectively, as deduplication is essential because during a shift if four thousand to five thousand alerts are triggering, it is a lot of noise, so to reduce that noise, we have created a deduplication rule by adding a rule in Golang, and apart from it, we have suppression rules, resulting in a lot of noise being reduced after deduplication, allowing the team to handle critical alerts by removing such noise.

Squadcast has positively impacted our organization because we are timely getting alerts, and based on those alerts, we can take the required actions, so if there is any burning security alert, we can timely act to avoid production downtime, which results in a return on investment, and there are many transactional costs involved in it, so by reducing the downtime of the system, we are able to save revenue loss from the client side.

As for specific metrics, we commit to a 99.99 SLA, and by receiving timely alerts, we have saved multiple productions, leading to significant revenue savings.

In terms of improvements for Squadcast, there are opportunities, such as having only two workflows for tagging alerts based on priority P1, P2, with our current premium plan. It would be beneficial if we had multiple workflows inside Squadcast, because after the premium package, we have an unlimited number of workflows, but for mid-sized organizations, the lower premium segment only allows two workflows, and sometimes we see slowness while making changes in escalation policies.

I have been using Squadcast for the last two and a half years.

In my experience, Squadcast is very stable.

Squadcast's scalability is very impressive.

Squadcast has excellent customer support. I would rate the customer support a ten out of ten.

Previously, we used PagerDuty, which was too costly, and we switched to Squadcast because it is very user-friendly.

We purchased Squadcast through the AWS Marketplace .

We have seen a lot of ROI from Squadcast, as timely actions on alerts lead to revenue savings, especially if your environment is going down without alerts; with timely notifications, you can fix issues and mitigate the impact on your production environment, which also helps in managing transactional costs and reducing the number of employees needed to tackle alerts promptly.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing shows that it is not that costly compared to other tools. It is very much affordable, with a license cost of around twelve dollars per user, so it is not that much costly.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing Squadcast; we primarily considered cost and found Squadcast to be much more affordable than PagerDuty.

My advice for others looking into using Squadcast is that if someone needs an affordable incident management tool, they should definitely consider Squadcast for its low pricing and multiple features. I would rate this review a nine out of ten.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS )

My main use case for Squadcast  is alert management and incident response. I use Squadcast  to get all my alerts in one place, and then I use it to send notifications to my channel. I also have on-call engineers in place so that when a particular alert is triggered, they are notified and can check what the issue is.

The best features Squadcast offers are the great UI and the metrics I get for alerts, particularly MTTR. What I appreciate most about the UI and alert metrics is how intuitive it is. For first-time users, it is also beneficial as people are able to understand and use it easily.

Squadcast has positively impacted my organization by helping with incident management and enabling alerts to be responded to more quickly. Management has improved overall, and the people on call are now more responsive since using Squadcast.

Squadcast could be improved if the pricing could be reduced per user.

I have been using Squadcast for one year.

I have not experienced any stability issues.

I have not experienced any scalability issues.

My advice to others looking into using Squadcast is that it is a good tool for alert management and monitoring alerts.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Squadcast  is used as an incident management tool where alerts are received that have been configured in Alertmanager. Whenever a threshold is breached, the alert reaches Squadcast  and notifications are delivered via phone calls, SMS, and email.

Multiple features in Squadcast help manage incidents, including the ability to create multiple escalation policies based on microservices teams. Whenever an alert triggers, it routes to the respective microservices team, which reduces noise. Team members on shift receive notifications via phone calls repeatedly if they cannot respond over Squadcast UI, allowing them to acknowledge the alert by receiving the phone call and also receive notifications over SMS.

Squadcast is used primarily as an incident management tool with different use cases across more than 10 environments. Different services have been created and integrated with Prometheus via webhook API, and escalation policies have been created based on primary and secondary on-call rotations, so the respective team receives alerts based on the hierarchy.

Squadcast provides numerous features, including the ability to create and add runbooks via workflow, put services in maintenance mode during maintenance, suppress alerts during scheduled maintenance from AWS , and add tags to create routes based on tags to ensure that the respective alert is automatically assigned to the appropriate team, which helps reduce noise and ensures only the responsible team receives alerts.

The tagging and routing feature in Squadcast has made the biggest difference because with 10 to 15 teams, if all team members receive the same alert, it creates noise. Thanks to the tagging feature, alerts can be directly assigned based on labels inside the alerts to respective teams so they can take timely actions on those alerts.

Runbooks can be added inside the alerts based on the workflow inside Squadcast.

Squadcast has improved MTTA and MTTR because previously, resolving issues would take time, but now alerts are received within a one-minute time frame, allowing acknowledgment and timely action. Squadcast has positively impacted the organization with its notification feature that allows receiving a call in case an alert is missed from the UI, enabling timely action, which helps in resolving issues within the minimum time frame and prevents more production issues.

Squadcast could be improved because when multiple alerts trigger, the team currently performs manual resolution of those alerts. There should be a restriction at the team side so they cannot manually resolve those alerts, which would lead to improvements in Squadcast. Apart from that, Squadcast is working well.

Squadcast has been used for the last four years.

Squadcast is very stable.

Squadcast is very scalable.

Excellent customer support is provided by the Squadcast team.

Previously, PagerDuty was used, but the switch was made to Squadcast due to the numerous features it provides.

Squadcast was purchased through the AWS Marketplace .

There is definitely a return on investment because by acknowledging alerts timely and taking prior action, downtime is avoided, which indirectly affects revenue, thus saving many costs.

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing are reasonable compared to other tools. It is also very scalable and fits well within the budget.

Before choosing Squadcast, different tools were evaluated, but compared to others, Squadcast was found to be quite reasonable with a multitude of features, which is why it was chosen.

If looking for a stable incident management tool, Squadcast is strongly recommended. The overall review rating for this product is 9.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS)