As developers, we found Squadcast incredibly easy to integrate with our tech stack - we were up and running within a couple of hours, without needing to speak to anyone. With Squadcast we have been able to minimize our downtime to NIL, streamline our on-call schedules and escalate the right alerts based on the severity & its effect on service degradation - thus improving our reliability & uptime for our users.
Mailbird is an all-in-one Windows desktop email client where users can save time by managing multiple accounts at the same time. Mailbird currently has more than 3 million downloads, altogether handling a large amount of business and personal emails on a global scale. Being able to manage several spread-out resources was key to Mailbird, in order to keep them up and running to maintain the level of service expected by their customers.
In order to pinpoint service degradation and react proactively to incidents, they began their search for a centralized tool to do so. Among the tools evaluated, they found Squadcast to be the easiest to set up to streamline their on-call alerting and adopt a metric-driven approach to incident management.
On-call team is spread out across multiple time zones: Difficult to manage a proper on-call schedule due to different time zones which also led to a lack of visibility of any gaps in their on-call roster.
Easy scheduling & roster visibility: Centralized scheduling system helped streamline the on-call roster, and proactively detected any gaps in their schedules.
Alert severity was an unknown leading to alert fatigue: Without visibility into the severity of an alert, each alert was treated as an emergency, causing alert fatigue among team members.
Effective routing according to the severity of alert: With Squadcast, highly configurable tagging and routing rules enabled only critical alerts to be routed to the right team member at the right time, based on the severities defined.
Ineffective escalation policies: Unstructured alerting resulted in an overload of alerts sent to the team lead which caused anxiety and fatigue.
Better escalations, improved ownership: Setting up escalation policies helped them escalate issues, and allowed the team lead to transfer ownership to the right person and on time.
Squadcast helped them adopt a metric-driven approach via tracking MTTA and MTTR, & also proactively detected degradations beforehand.
With clear accountability & ownership, and communication, they are now able to effectively implement their on-call schedules.
New team members can quickly understand the infrastructure via Squadcast, which makes the onboarding of new team members simpler.
Alerts are now routed according to the severity, and handled by the right on-call person, leading to better productivity.
Squadcast helped them adopt a metric-driven approach via tracking MTTA and MTTR, & also proactively detected degradations beforehand.
With clear accountability & ownership, and communication, they are now able to effectively implement their on-call schedules.
New team members can quickly understand the infrastructure via Squadcast, which makes the onboarding of new team members simpler.
Alerts are now routed according to the severity, and handled by the right on-call person, leading to better productivity.