My main use case for Squadcast is for incident management.
A specific example of how I use Squadcast for incident management is that we have set up Prometheus and Alertmanager, and from Alertmanager, we receive alerts over Squadcast whenever the threshold reaches.
I have integrated Prometheus and Alertmanager using a webhook inside Squadcast, so whenever the threshold breaches for an alert, it will trigger a notification inside Squadcast via email, phone, and SMS.
The best features that Squadcast offers include notifications over phone, email, and SMS, which allow for multiple notifications helping us respond quickly to alerts if a Squadcast email is missed. I can directly set up escalation policies inside Squadcast and route alerts based on different microservices.
We manage around ten to fifteen microservices, making it easy to handle alerts based on escalation policies, where every week we have primary and secondary on-call persons. In the first five minutes, the primary receives the notification, and after ten minutes, the secondary receives it, escalating it through a hierarchy. Different services have different escalation policies, so when a specific service alert triggers, it routes to that particular escalation policy, helping suppress noise for the other team.
Squadcast includes numerous features such as the ability to suppress alerts based on maintenance windows, manage services for various environments, create different services, and use workflows where I can add tagging and attach my Confluence page, which acts as a runbook. There are also escalation policies, routing, tagging features, and the option to upload notes inside Squadcast alerts by taking a screenshot or writing down notes.
Squadcast has positively impacted our organization by providing timely acknowledgment of alerts, which improves our handling of production issues. The team can monitor alerts and take actions promptly, routing them to the respective team if application service requirements arise.
We measure the improvement via SLO inside Squadcast using MTTA and MTTR.
Squadcast can be improved if we restrict the manual resolution of alerts, as currently this feature is lacking inside Squadcast. Apart from this, it is working perfectly fine, with lots of features inside Squadcast.
I have been using Squadcast for the last three years.
Squadcast is very stable.
Squadcast's scalability is very good, and we can integrate multiple services inside Squadcast.
The customer support provided by Squadcast is excellent.
I have not used any other incident management tool previously, and Squadcast is the first one I have used.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is very budget-friendly with annual licensing, and there is not much setup cost involved.
My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
I have seen a return on investment with Squadcast because if any alert triggers and is taken seriously, we have severity levels based on criticality and warning, allowing us to acknowledge alerts and take timely action, directly helping to reduce production incidents impacting revenue.
Before choosing Squadcast, I evaluated multiple incident management tools, and after looking at other options, we switched to Squadcast because it is within budget and contains multiple features.
My advice for others looking into using Squadcast is that if you are looking for a scalable incident management tool, you should definitely go for Squadcast because it offers numerous features including escalation policies, routing, tagging, and note addition inside incident management, and also includes a maintenance mode with a variety of features. I would rate this product nine out of ten.
