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.

My main use case for Squadcast is incident management and escalating alerts to the respective team.

A specific example of how I have used Squadcast for incident management and alert escalation is that we have integrated Squadcast with alerting tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, and Alertmanager. Whenever the threshold breaches, we receive the notification from Alertmanager to Squadcast using a Squadcast integrating webhook from inside the service. Once the threshold breaches, we get the alert and the notification for any issue in our system.

Whenever my team receives an alert, based on the severity, they will take the required action, and if it is related to the service owner, they will escalate it to the respective service according to the microservice team escalation policy.

The best features Squadcast offers include the ability to get weekly and monthly reports by opening the incidents and applying filters. Additionally, you can create multiple escalation policies, create tags based on those policies, and route alerts to the respective teams. You can also suppress alerts during maintenance windows, which helps reduce noise from alerts.

The maintenance window suppression has helped my team significantly, especially in our production environment with numerous setups. If any maintenance is ongoing and the system is down, receiving down alerts during that window creates noise, risking missing genuine alerts for other production environments.

Regarding the features of Squadcast, I would like to add that we can insert notes within Squadcast alerts and share findings so that any senior person can directly review them and guide other team members.

Squadcast has impacted my organization positively by providing timely notifications through phone calls, SMS, and emails, enabling us to respond within that time range and maintain our system running.

When we receive alerts in a timely manner, we can proactively monitor our systems without downtime, maintaining system health with proper alerts. Within the time frame, we can take the necessary action to resolve those alerts, helping to delay major incidents and achieving uptime above 99.9% and 99.2%.

Squadcast requires improvement in that whenever team members upload notes, there is a restriction preventing them from manually resolving alerts. Alerts can only be resolved via proper signals from Alertmanager. Users should not be able to resolve incidents without manual intervention.

This is a major requirement because team members sometimes resolve alerts manually, risking the resolution of critical alerts. Additionally, with multiple production environments and services, we receive multiple alerts for issues such as the same disk alert several times. To reduce this noise, we utilize suppression and need deduplication rules. Having a feature to set deduplication rules in one service applicable to other services would be a great help.

Other improvements needed for Squadcast include observations I have made over the last four years, and I will convey any updates regarding improvements in the future.

I have been using Squadcast for around four years.

Squadcast is very stable.

Squadcast's scalability is excellent. You can scale it as per your use case.

The customer support is excellent. You can directly raise a customer ticket and have a call with the customer team to resolve queries in a minimal time span.

I previously used PagerDuty before switching to Squadcast because it offers various features such as alert suppression based on payload uniqueness and the ability to set multiple escalation policies and create tags to route alerts to the correct microservices. Cost comparison showed that Squadcast is not as expensive as PagerDuty.

I evaluated other alternatives to PagerDuty, though I cannot recall the names of the other options we reviewed.

I have seen a good return on investment. If you can resolve issues in your environment without any production incidents, it directly impacts revenue. By taking timely actions, you can address issues without revenue loss, which is definitely a return on investment.

The pricing is overall within the budget and is on a per-user basis. Increasing the number of users affects the pricing, but overall, the pricing and licensing costs fit in the budget and are not too costly considering the features provided.

I would rate Squadcast eight out of ten.

I chose that rating because if Squadcast addresses the points I have mentioned, including eliminating manual intervention for resolving alerts and enabling deduplication across services, I would rate it ten out of ten.

My advice for others looking into using Squadcast is that they should definitely consider it. You will find multiple features within budget, and it improves your system health by timely monitoring and receiving alerts. Receiving alerts leads to improvements in MTTR and MTTA, allowing you to resolve issues with minimal service impact.