Learn how Squadcast helped GrowthPlug improve Reliability across the board

Squadcast is instrumental in enabling us to meet our SLAs and provide maximum uptime, thus helping us keep our customers happy. With Squadcast, it's easy to create on-call schedules across different timezones, automatically route alerts, and define escalation policies that reach the right on-call engineer. Overall, Squadcast has positively impacted us and our on-call team is much happier than before.

Arjun Vallyara

Technical Team Lead, GrowthPlug

About

GrowthPlug

Industry:

Healthcare

Location:

San Jose, United States

GrowthPlug is a SaaS solution that helps healthcare offices become more modern, efficient, and profitable online by providing a patient-first experience. They help speed up new patient acquisition, manage online reputation and reviews, automate front-desk operations, and improve the overall patient experience.

Prior to using Squadcast, GrowthPlug followed an ad-hoc on-call process. Their process required manual intervention while doing both:

1) Coordinating schedules across teams, and
2) Assigning critical incidents to on-call staff.

By implementing Squadcast, GrowthPlug is able to automate many of its on-call processes and in the process, reduced their alert fatigue and improved their staff’s on-call experience. Using Squadcast has thus enhanced their Reliability processes and over time, they have been able to deliver better customer experience.

Challenges and Solutions

Challenges

Solutions

Lacked a formal tool for on-call scheduling: The lack of a dedicated tool for tracking on-call schedules made it difficult to schedule evenly distributed on-call rotations. Having a team spread around the world across different timezones added to the complexity.

Maintaining a centralized on-call calendar: By using ‘Schedules’, GrowthPlug could maintain a centralized on-call rotations calendar that could be shared with their entire on-call team. This made it easy to escalate issues to the appropriate team during outages irrespective of their geographical location.

Dependent on external tools for uptime checks: GrowthPlug depended on external monitoring tools(UptimeRobot & more). In case of an incident, alerts from these tools had to still be manually routed to the specific on-call engineer by an intermediary.

Automated uptime checks: After integrating their ‘alerting workflows’ with Squadcast, incidents are detected instantly, and then routed automatically to the concerned on-call engineer.

Over-reliance on emails and logs for troubleshooting: GrowthPlug’s ad-hoc on-call process meant troubleshooting was done by analyzing logs and reading emails. This made it harder to spot critical issues in their infrastructure in realtime.

Squadcast helped Growthplug adopt a formal on-call process: By introducing Squadcast into their incident management workflow, they have real-time insight into the affected services and the incident status on a centralized dashboard. This helps in responding to outages better.

Lack of accountability/ownership of incidents: Formerly when an incident was reported, there would be no official record of any engineer acknowledging, resolving, or escalating the issue to another person.

Better clarity, improved accountability/ ownership: Squadcast’s Incident Activity Timeline provided the entire team with greater transparency into incident response. Alerts missed (if any) and escalations made were clear to all team members.

Key Benefits

Better Postmortems and RCA

Squadcast’s Activity Timeline documents incident-related activities in chronological order. This is helping GrowthPlug perform better Postmortems with a far more effective RCA.

Faster response thanks to Push notifications

Receiving alerts via push notifications on the Squadcast mobile app is helping GrowthPlug’s on-call engineers provide a timely response to critical incidents.

Single source of truth of infrastructure health

By integrating with monitoring/ logging tools, Squadcast forms a centralized location containing a single source of truth, providing details about the overall infrastructure health.

Simple & flexible On-call scheduling

Squadcast's customizable on-call scheduling allows GrowthPlug to create on-call rotations for teams in different geographies and timezones without hassle.