Learn how NestEgg made their platform more reliable by using Squadcast

Our platform’s overall reliability has increased since we started using Squadcast for incident management. We have been able to easily integrate it with our monitoring stack, define strict escalation policies, and establish routing rules to alert our oncall engineers in case of an incident. Most importantly, managing oncall schedules has become so much more simpler & faster.

Eric Jelinek

Vice President of Technology, NestEgg

About

NestEgg

Industry:

Real estate

Location:

Chicago, United States

NestEgg is a startup from the real estate space that assists rental property owners manage their properties easily and effectively. Their app provides owners with on-demand access to specialists for coordinating maintenance activities and services along with a load of other features in a seamless and cost effective manner.

On the technical side, the challenges faced by NestEgg’s engineering team were typically those faced by any fast growing startup. As their engineering team was scaling, there was a need to establish strong reliability practices within the engineering discipline. Squadcast’s integration with Slack means that incident management is now a collaborative process within NestEgg.

By using Squadcast, NestEgg has been able to proactively react to problems in their infrastructure before it gets reported by either stakeholders or customers. As their team size and needs evolve over the next few years, NestEgg hopes to do better SRE by defining SLAs and SLOs, tracking reliability metrics such as their uptime, MTTA, MTTR and implementing other Squadcast features such as StatusPages and Postmortems.

Challenges and Solutions

Challenges

Solutions

Manual detection of issues: As a startup, a lack of formal SRE practices in place meant they received numerous complaints from stakeholders and customers about system downtime and the app loading slow.

Automated alerting when issues are detected: By integrating Squadcast with Datadog, they could detect issues early and also auto-assign it to engineers for remediation. This helped them to formally start tracking MTTA and MTTR, and fix issues before it was even reported by customers and internal stakeholders.

Overwhelming feature-set with other incident management platforms: Most of the alternatives they evaluated had unnecessary features at a premium price point which did not make sense for a startup like NestEgg.

Transparent and easy to use: With Squadcast, NestEgg found a tool which was both easy to use and had all the basic features they were looking for(solving their problems). Squadcast also helped them scale easily from a 4-member team to a 12-member team.

Lack of escalation policies and routing capabilities: Prior to using Squadcast, NestEgg had a single channel for reporting incidents. There was no further insight into who acknowledged the incident and what the resolution status was.

Automated routing rules and escalation policies in place: Squadcast helped them define escalation policies based on incident severity and also establish routing rules which would alert only the concerned team/ engineer. Squadcast’s incident dashboard provided them with a comprehensive view of the resolution status, the corresponding oncall engineer, etc.

Manual on-call scheduling with spreadsheets: In the beginning, manually tracking oncall schedules was done using spreadsheets. But as the team grew, it became time consuming to make changes and share the update with other team members about oncall rotations.

Automated dashboard for oncall scheduling: With Squadcast’s unified on-call and rotation schedule, it became easier to make changes to schedules and update the team if any holidays/ leaves were planned. This helped them reduce the time spent on manually updating spreadsheets.

Key Benefits

Centralized Incident management dashboard

Thanks to Squadcast, NestEgg now has a centralized dashboard for reporting all the details about an incident such as resolution status, oncall engineer, etc.

Escalations & On-call routing

By using Squadcast’s tagging and routing rules, NestEgg were able to route alerts to the concerned team and also escalate incidents based on the priority and severity of impact.

Proactive Incident resolution

By integrating Squadcast into their monitoring tech stack, NestEgg is able to identify issues with page load speed and/or server downtime before it gets reported by internal stakeholders and customers.

Best features, cost-effective pricing

Squadcast’s transparent and fair pricing allowed NestEgg to leverage the required features needed to solve their high-priority tasks and not get burdened with unnecessary/unused features offered by other conventional alerting tools. This was also their preferred tool to scale their growing team based on requirements.

Key Benefits

Centralized Incident management dashboard

Thanks to Squadcast, NestEgg now has a centralized dashboard for reporting all the details about an incident such as resolution status, oncall engineer, etc.

Escalations & On-call routing

By using Squadcast’s tagging and routing rules, NestEgg were able to route alerts to the concerned team and also escalate incidents based on the priority and severity of impact.

Proactive Incident resolution

Best features, cost-effective pricing

What our customers have to say

Eric Jelinek

Vice President of Technology, NestEgg

Ever since we started using Squadcast, we have been able to proactively fix production issues before it gets reported by customers and other stakeholders.

View Case Study

Ever since we started using Squadcast, we have been able to proactively fix production issues before it gets reported by customers and other stakeholders.

Eric Jelinek

Vice President of Technology, NestEgg