Learn how Matsuri Japon established a formal Incident Response process with Squadcast

This case study explains how Matsuri Japan being a non-profit organization, is able to use Squadcast’s Free plan to establish a formal Incident Response process. They leverage Squadcast to reduce alert fatigue, promote stakeholder visibility, track incident metrics and improve incident response with tagging and routing rules.

Antoine Tu

Head of IT, Matsuri Japon

About

Matsuri Japon

Industry:

Non-Profit Organization

Location:

Montreal, Canada

Matsuri Japon is a Japanese non-profit organization based out of Canada. They started using Squadcast when they were in serious need of an Incident Response tool. Considering the nature of their organization, (Squadcast’s) Freemium plan seemed to be the most logical option compared to other platforms like PagerDuty and Opsgenie that come at a hefty price even for basic requirements.

Being a non-profit organisation, Matsuri is supported by volunteers and has limited resources dedicated towards their IT department. With a growing user base and an ever-evolving tech stack, which now includes a multi-cloud Kubernetes deployment, the need for an incident management tool became apparent.

Matsuri Japon then adopted Squadcast, a fully-featured incident management platform that is both affordable and reliable for organisations with small on-call teams to manage their infrastructure in a cost-effective yet reliable manner.

Challenges and Solutions

Challenges

Solutions

Alert Fatigue: Prior to using Squadcast, their Slack channel was getting dumped with notifications, irrespective of their severity or nature. There was a lack of clarity on which incident notifications were critical in nature and which incident notifications were merely information.

Alert Suppression: Squadcast’s alert suppression feature allowed Matsuri to weed out non-critical alerts by suppressing notifications for non-actionable alerts. They could further categorise alerts based on their severity or priority and route them to the relevant members based on tags defined within the platform. This helped them separate the signal from the noise.

Lack of Stakeholder Management support: Most of their team members were from a non-technical background. This led to challenges while communicating the extent of outages to the relevant stakeholders.

Squadcast Status Pages: Using Squadcast’s status pages, it was easy to keep stakeholders and non-technical members informed of the Incident status. It was now possible to visually show if critical outages were resolved.

Alert Noise: Matsuri Japon had multiple alert services monitoring their infrastructure for safety and backup purposes. This means risking getting duplicate alert notifications from different sources for the same incident.

Alert De-duplication: Squadcast’s De-duplication rules can aggregate and group alerts coming from diverse data sources and suppress redundant notifications based on the rules defined.

Lack of visibility on team performance: Prior to using Squadcast, they did not have metrics in place to measure reliability and team productivity of on-call engineers. Since alerts were sent to Slack, there was no record if they were acknowledged or resolved. Thus there was no way to track MTTA/MTTR.

Discoverability/Transparency of metrics and performance: Squadcast’s incident dashboard allowed Matsuri to track the MTTR(Mean time to respond) and plan out improvements to their infrastructure.

Key Benefits

Reduced Alert Fatigue

Squadcast’s Alert Suppression rules helps on-call teams separate the signal from the noise. They are now able to weed out irrelevant notifications, and route only high-priority, high-severity notifications to relevant team members on their Slack channel.

Effective Stakeholder Management

By using our platform’s Status Pages, they are able to keep non-technical members and other stakeholders informed of the Incident status.This helps their on-call team concentrate exclusively on firefighting and without any distractions.

Detailed Dashboard to Track Metrics

Squadcast’s feature rich dashboard proved to be a single source of truth and allowed them to track incident status and analyze past incidents. This also helped them measure MTTA and MTTR for incidents and plan infrastructure upgrades accordingly.

Better Incident Response with Tagging & Routing rules

By setting up Incident Tagging rules, Matsuri Japon could make incoming alerts, context-rich. Since critical information such as severity, priority, and nature of the incident were established during alert notification, they are now able to route the alerts to the right responders and manage incidents more effectively.

Key Benefits

Reduced Alert Fatigue

Effective Stakeholder Management

Detailed Dashboard to Track Metrics

Better Incident Response with Tagging & Routing rules

Best Features, cost-effective pricing

All the features that Matsuri Japon were looking for in their use case, were available in Squadcast’s Freemium plan. On the other hand, PagerDuty seemed more expensive even without features such as StatusPage and Postmortem templates, and Ospgenie lacked many key integrations in spite of being more expensive.

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