Learn how Mapgears simplified their complex On-Call alerting process with Squadcast

Squadcast has helped us aggregate alerts coming in from hundreds of services into one single platform. We no longer have to deal with mixed messages as there is more clarity about alerts arising from multiple sources at the same time. Now when an incident occurs, the engineer who is serving the oncall shift gets notified accurately.

Alexandre Lessard

System Analyst, Mapgears

About

Mapgears

Industry:

Technology

Location:

Canada

Mapgears help organisations leverage real-time geospatial data for activities such as recreational trails navigation, marine operations analysis, or simply to locate oneself during an expedition. Be it for optimizing their operations or for better decision-making, users from the public-work sector are heavily reliant on Mapgears’ real-time updates.

Mapgears, who get close to 3 million website hits on a normal business day, receive almost double that amount during peak season. Reliability & Uptime are essential if they are to consistently offer a good customer experience. Since they were also dealing with large amounts of real-time map updates, they were on the lookout for an incident management platform that would help them detect problems early, even before it starts affecting their customers.

With the help of Squadcast, Mapgears was able to streamline their incident response process by aggregating alerts coming from 300+ services spread across 15 physical servers. By leveraging Squadcast’s highly configurable tagging and routing rules, their oncall engineers are able to swiftly respond to incidents and improve the quality of service provided to customers.

Challenges and Solutions

Challenges

Solutions

Alert Fatigue: Mapgears had a complex process of monitoring over 300 services from 15 different physical servers for their daily operations. When a service went down, they were getting bombarded with multiple alerts regarding the same service.

Reduced Fatigue with Alert Deduplication: By integrating Squadcast with their alerting tools, Mapgears were able to use Alert De-duplication rules to silence unnecessary alerts from the same service from getting triggered repeatedly.

Lack of clarity on Incident severity: Prior to using Squadcast, Mapgears struggled to determine which incidents needed a priority response. Since alerts were also triggered for incidents on staging and test environments, classifying and determining high-priority incidents from low-priority ones were tedious and confusing.

Classification and contextual routing: By using Squadcast, Mapgears were able to classify incidents based on the nature of the incidents (severity), the environment from which the alert is triggered, its priority, etc from the incoming payloads and auto-tag them. Based on this, they could define routing rules to notify only the concerned engineer(s).

Lack of formal on-call process: Mapgears did not have a proper tool for maintaining oncall schedules and it was confusing to track and determine the oncall responsibilities of engineers on a particular day.

Better and easy on-call scheduling: Squadcast’s oncall schedules helped Mapgears set up an automated oncall rotation policy that could accurately route notifications and alerts. This helped them identify who is currently on-call and allowed them to make changes if required.

Key Benefits

Centralized Incident management Dashboard

Mapgears’ complex IT infrastructure involved monitoring hundreds of services spread across numerous physical servers. By bringing all the alerts into Squadcast’s platform, they have now built a well-defined alerting and oncall process.

Clear and Easy On-Call scheduling

Squadcast’s oncall scheduling helped Mapgears establish a formal oncall rotation policy that was easy to set up and customize. This along with the oncall reminder notifications gives their engineers more clarity and accountability regarding their oncall responsibilities.

Context rich Alerting & Incident Management

Squadcast’s tagging rules have helped Mapgears classify incidents appropriately and route alerts accurately to the concerned engineer based on the nature/ priority/ severity of the incident. This also helps them identify problem services and servers most prone to incidents.

Easy Setup and Responsive Support

Squadcast’s easy-to-understand UI helps Mapgears quickly onboard their team members and hit the ground running. Thanks to Squadcast’s responsive support team, Mapgears were able to navigate through hurdles and quickly set up their incident management process.

Key Benefits

Centralized Incident management Dashboard

Clear and Easy On-Call scheduling

Context rich Alerting & Incident Management

Easy Setup and Responsive Support

What our customers have to say

Alexandre Lessard

System Analyst, Mapgears

Thanks to Squadcast, we have been able to streamline our existing alerting process in spite of the complexities resulting from monitoring numerous servers and services.

View Case Study

Thanks to Squadcast, we have been able to streamline our existing alerting process in spite of the complexities resulting from monitoring numerous servers and services.

Alexandre Lessard

System Analyst, Mapgears