Learn How Macrometa Transformed their Incident Management process with Squadcast's Powerful On-Call Alerting and Scheduling Capabilities

As the Director of Cloud Operations at Macrometa, I've always been on the lookout for solutions that can elevate our operational efficiency and system reliability. Adopting Squadcast has been a game-changer for Macrometa. Its robust features, combined with seamless Slack integrations, have transformed our incident management process. The ability to quickly acknowledge incidents, coupled with real-time collaboration tools, has significantly enhanced our team's responsiveness. I'm really impressed with Squadcast's capabilities and would recommend it to any organization that prioritizes reliability and operational efficiency.

Kalin Ivanov

Director of Cloud Operations, Macrometa

About

Macrometa

Industry:

Information Technology Services

Location:

San Mateo, California

Macrometa operates by leveraging its Global Data Network (GDN), an advanced cloud platform that enables users to gain real-time insights and take immediate action from anywhere worldwide. They help businesses overcome the limitations of centralized cloud platforms, allowing them to leverage the power of hundreds of data centers to achieve ultra-low-latency performance.

Macrometa operates a 24/7 customer support operation that is essential to meeting the needs of its global clientele and maintaining uninterrupted service delivery. They rely heavily on Incident Management and escalation processes to ensure incidents are resolved quickly and efficiently.

However, their previous Incident Management process was manual, time-consuming, and error-prone. This led to delays in Incident Resolution and made tracking and analyzing incidents difficult.

With Squadcast, Macrometa streamlined their On-Call and Incident Management processes by setting up On-Call schedules for 24/7 support operations. Moreover, the integration of incident-specific Slack channels enables On-Call engineers to communicate and respond to incidents more efficiently.

Challenges and Solutions

Challenges

Solutions

Manual On-Call Process & Inefficient Alerting

Macrometa's manual On-Call process posed challenges in effectively managing their On-Call engineers, often failing to keep track of who's On-Call. The lack of alert aggregation tools resulted in delayed incident escalation.

This led to service outages, potential SLA impacts, and customer dissatisfaction.

Seamless On-Call Scheduling and Alerting

Macrometa leverages Squadcast's highly configurable On-Call Schedules, Escalation Policies, and Incident Notification capabilities that help them set up On-Call rotations, multiple levels of Escalation, and alert the right On-Call engineers on time. This has helped in minimizing errors and streamlining incident tracking, resulting in reduced Mean time to resolve (MTTR).

High Alert Noise & Fatigue:

Without an On-Call alerting tool, they could not separate critical alerts from non-critical alerts.

Combined with a high volume of alerts, the On-Call engineers had to deal with alert noise and fatigue, resulting in decreased efficiency and higher resolution times.

Streamlined Alerting and Notifications:

Squadcast's Event tagging and Routing rules add more context to incidents, ensuring they are efficiently directed to the appropriate responders.

Suppression rules help them suppress non-critical alerts and reduce alert fatigue, especially during scheduled maintenance.

By integrating with multiple alert sources such as Prometheus, Hyperping, Email, and Grafana, Squadcast helps them filter and consolidate alerts, reducing noise and ensuring only critical alerts are received.

Slow Incident Acknowledgement and Response:

Engineers were slow to acknowledge incidents that often culminated in reduced visibility and limited collaboration, ultimately leading to longer incident response times.

Incident Response on the Go with Squadcast’s Mobile App:

Macrometa engineers can acknowledge incidents & get alerted via the Squadcast mobile app. The app enables users to conveniently respond to incidents and access their On-Call schedules from anywhere, ensuring agility and responsiveness on the go.

Lack of Incident Communication Channels:

The lack of effective communication channels and integrations meant that engineers weren't promptly notified of incidents, which had the potential to escalate into more significant problems. Consequently, this led to delayed resolutions.

Better Incident Response, Acknowledgement, & On-Call Culture:

Squadcast's Slack integration helped Macrometa create incident-specific Slack channels, boosting incident communication and enabling users to actively receive, view, acknowledge, resolve, & add comments to alerts from Slack, thus improving their MTTA and MTTR.

Key Benefits

Dedicated & Proactive Support

Macrometa leverages Squadcast's detailed documentation and timely support offered by Squadcast's dedicated account managers, allowing them to communicate their relevant requirements directly.

Building SRE Culture to overcome Toil

Squadcast has helped Macrometa establish an SRE culture by streamlining incident escalation and offering automation rules to reduce MTTA, minimize toil, and increase team productivity through strategic initiatives.

Enhanced Collaboration And Real-Time Communication

With Squadcast, their On-Call engineers can leverage two-way Slack communication to flexibly respond to incident alerts in real-time, execute commands, perform actions, etc., and manage incidents even when away from their workstations.

Context Rich Alerts

Their On-Call engineers can classify incidents based on severity, alert type, etc. & add tags to automatically route the incidents to the right person by using Squadcast's Alert Tagging & Routing Rules.

Key Benefits

Dedicated & Proactive Support

Macrometa leverages Squadcast's detailed documentation and timely support offered by Squadcast's dedicated account managers, allowing them to communicate their relevant requirements directly.