For media tech companies like YourStory, with a massive online presence and millions of users, ensuring service uptime is paramount. Their website caters to a niche audience of 10 million readers globally, making it crucial to maintain smooth operations 24/7. This translates to managing over 14 TB of monthly traffic and 13 million API hits — a task that demands a robust and efficient alerting system.
In this blog, we’ll explore how YourStory, India’s leading media platform for entrepreneurs, leveraged Squadcast, a powerful pagerduty alternative, to achieve exceptional operational visibility and streamline their incident response process.
Challenges Faced by YourStory with Traditional Alerting Tools
- Limited Visibility at a High Cost: YourStory’s previous alerting tool restricted visibility across departments due to a cost associated with every additional stakeholder. This meant crucial information wasn’t readily available to customer support, product managers, and other essential personnel, hindering effective collaboration.
- Inaccurate Measurement of Resolution Times: The existing tool lacked the capability to accurately measure Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) and Mean Time To Acknowledgement (MTTA), making it difficult to assess the efficiency of their incident response.
- Unforeseen Costs and Scheduling Issues: During a large-scale migration, YourStory was billed multiple times for the same alerts, inflating their overall alerting costs. Additionally, the tool’s cumbersome scheduling features made managing on-call rotations a tedious task.
How Squadcast Resolved YourStory’s Visibility and Alerting Issues
Squadcast offered a solution to these challenges with its unique features:
- Unrestricted Visibility with Free Stakeholder Licenses: Squadcast eliminates departmental silos with its free and unlimited stakeholder licenses. This empowers customer support, product managers, and all relevant personnel to stay on the same page as the operations team, fostering a collaborative environment.
- Squadcast Analytics for Improved Resolution Times: Squadcast’s robust analytics dashboard provides valuable insights into MTTR and MTTA. This data empowers YourStory to identify areas for improvement and continuously optimize their incident response process.
- Transparent and Flexible Pricing: Squadcast offers a clear, predictable pricing structure, unlike their previous tool’s surprise billing during migrations. This ensures cost-effectiveness and eliminates hidden charges.
- Effortless On-Call Scheduling: Squadcast simplifies on-call scheduling with automated features that handle customized rotations and time zones. This frees up valuable time for YourStory’s team to focus on core tasks.
Key Benefits Achieved by YourStory with Squadcast
- Enhanced Operational Transparency: Squadcast provides a comprehensive view of the system’s health, allowing all team members to see who’s working on what incident and the overall response progress. This transparency fosters better communication and collaboration.
- Faster Resolution Through Collaboration: Squadcast’s virtual incident war rooms enable real-time collaboration, bringing the right responders together virtually to address issues swiftly.
- Optimized On-Call Scheduling: Squadcast’s automated scheduling streamlines on-call management, ensuring the right people are notified promptly based on customized rotations and time zones.
- Reduced MTTR: Squadcast’s runbooks provide step-by-step guidance for resolving known incidents, significantly reducing MTTR and minimizing downtime.
Squadcast: The Ideal Alternative for Enhanced Visibility and Streamlined Alerting
YourStory’s experience with Squadcast highlights the platform’s effectiveness in overcoming the limitations of traditional alerting tools. With its focus on comprehensive visibility, improved collaboration, and cost-efficiency, Squadcast empowers businesses to achieve operational excellence.
Looking for Pagerduty Alternatives? Switch to Squadcast and experience the power of streamlined incident management? Sign up for a free trial today and see the difference Squadcast can make for your business!
P.S: Read the complete story here
Squadcast is an Incident Management tool that’s purpose-built for SRE. Get rid of unwanted alerts, receive relevant notifications and integrate with popular ChatOps tools. Work in collaboration using virtual incident war rooms and use automation to eliminate toil.
