A Case in Effective Incident Management With Squadcast

About

YAROOMS

Industry:

Workspace Management

Location:

Bucharest, Romania

YAROOMS is an innovative leader in workspace management solutions, catering to diverse organizations across the globe. With a focus on optimizing workspace utilization and enhancing user experiences, YAROOMS provides comprehensive tools for efficient workspace management across various industries.

Challenge:

YAROOMS faced the challenge of efficiently managing incidents for their global operations. Serving customers around the world, it was crucial for YAROOMS to ensure smooth operations, minimized downtime, and enhance experiences for their users. Before implementing Squadcast's Incident Management Platform, YAROOMS grappled with an ad hoc approach that often led to firefighting scenarios and consequent alert fatigue. With a limited pool of experienced personnel, the reactive nature of their incident handling impacted operational resilience and resource dependencies.

Solution:

Recognizing the need to streamline operations and address issues proactively, YAROOMS introduced Squadcast into their operations. This move aimed to adopt best practices in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), lessen the workload on their engineering and support teams, and foster a more organized and collaborative approach. Squadcast provided the capabilities to streamline On-Call Management. The seamless native integrations with their various systems also aided YAROOMS in changing to a different cloud platform, ensuring continued resilience in their operations.

The company was also able to leverage Squadcast's out-of-box integrations with various cloud platforms to facilitate a smooth planned transition from AWS to Azure. Integrating tools like New Relic was made easy as well, providing adaptability and flexibility.

Challenges and Solutions

Challenges

Solutions

Ad Hoc On-Call Mechanisms: Before implementing Squadcast, YAROOMS grappled with an ad hoc approach that often led to firefighting scenarios and consequent alert fatigue.

Structured On-Call Approach: By implementing Squadcast’s Schedules, proactive Alerting, and Automation Rules, YAROOMS reduced fire fighting situations. These critical features guarantee that incidents are swiftly routed and addressed, ensuring they reach the right people at the right time.

Reactive Incident Management, Slow Resolutions: YAROOMS struggled to preemptively identify and mitigate potential issues, resulting in occasional disruptions to their service.

Proactive, Efficient Incident Resolution: Clear Escalation Policies and Response Actions enabled teams to resolve issues quicker. Be it acknowledging incidents within minutes or implementing temporary mitigations, Squadcast allowed for smooth workflows.

Siloed Collaboration due to Fragmented Tooling: Coordinating incidents across various cloud platforms and integrating different third-party tools required a systematic approach to streamline communication and action.

Enhanced Collaboration: Squadcast's Mobile App, in addition to Integrations with ChatOps Integrations like MS Teams and Slack, facilitated efficient communication and coordination among team members. This increased collaboration, coupled with Tagging Rules to route and assign incidents, leads to quicker resolutions.

Inefficient Incident Resolution: Without a unified Incident Management platform, YAROOMS' engineering teams operated in isolated silos, often leading to inefficiencies and missed context during incidents.

Improved Productivity: With fewer ad-hoc interventions and easier access to Incident retrospectives, as well as resolution steps with Runbooks, YAROOMS' engineering team was able to address incidents efficiently and with better context, and focus on building solutions.

Lack of Critical Insights and Visibility: YAROOMS’ teams also suffered from a lack of critical insights and visibility into their operational landscape.

Centralized Incident Visibility: Squadcast’s Reliability Insights allows teams to track, draw and project critical insights from incident data.

Lack of External Stakeholder Communication: Improper communication with customers and stakeholders led to uncertainties and hampered experiences.

Transparency with Status Pages: Status Pages now let YAROOMS provide centralized visibility for internal and external stakeholders on any ongoing Incidents. This way teams can ensure that all relevant stakeholders are kept informed in a timely manner.

Key Benefits

Adoption of SRE Best Practices

YAROOMS is now able to practice Transparency with Status Pages, nurture a Culture of Continuous Learning with Runbooks and Postmortems, and leverage automation via Runbooks to help reduce MTTR.

Enhanced Collaboration and Visibility

Squadcast's integrations with collaboration platforms like MS Teams and Slack, as well as Status Pages and Reliability Insights allowed YAROOMS to collaborate and resolve incidents efficiently, gain critical insights, and keep all relevant stakeholders informed.

Improved Productivity and Efficiency

With a more streamlined resolution process leveraging Runbooks and Postmortems, developers at YAROOMS can now quickly address incidents and focus on building solutions.