Migrating From Your Tool to Squadcast

Originally published at Squadcast.com.

Introduction

In our recent blog we talked about how having separate tools for On-Call and for alerting sucks! And how Squadcast offers a lifeline with its all-in-one Incident Management and Reliability Automation platform by amalgamating multiple tool functionality under a single hood.  

This blog is all about how you can easily transition from your current Incident Management & alerting tool into a better and more reliable enterprise grade platform with Squadcast.

Where To Start? Evaluating Your Current Tool

Before diving headfirst into Squadcast, let's take a step back and assess your current tool. Every organization encounters unique challenges when diving into Incident Response. While it may be difficult to find a tool that addresses every specific need, finding one that covers most requirements is what everyone seeks.  In such scenarios, customization abilities and seamless integration with automation can go a long way in bridging the gaps and enhancing overall effectiveness. 

Here's a handy general checklist to help you identify potential limitations:

1. Automation: Does your current tool lack robust automation capabilities, leaving your team bogged down in manual tasks? We’re talking about advance automation strategies like Runbook automation, ChatOps, and multiple workflow actions.
2. Integrations: Is your current platform integrating seamlessly with your monitoring, ticketing, communication tool? Or is it lacking integrations with some specific tools in your tech stack?
3. Scalability: Can your current tool handle your growing needs and team size? Or inversely is your team size pretty small so you don’t need some high-level features to start off?
4. Alert Fatigue: Are your teams overwhelmed by noisy and irrelevant alerts? This has also been most of our customers' major pain point that Squadcast keeps in check pretty well.
5. Collaboration: Does your current platform hinder collaboration during incidents with features like war rooms or clear ownership assignment? If not it might be time before a mere incident becomes a huge critical disaster.

Many teams choose Squadcast over other popular options for specific reasons. But the top 4 reasons include: 

Firstly, Squadcast offers competitive pricing plans that can significantly reduce your overall spend on alerting and Incident Management. If you ideally take a popular alerting tool like PagerDuty, club it with an Incident Response tool like Incident.io or FireHydrant, you might end up paying $41 per user and $399 for AIOps separately. We haven’t yet considered the Incident Response tool’s additional pricing yet. However with Squdcast you get a pretty fair pricing starting at $21 per user for Enterprise level licenses.

Squadcast Pricing

Squadcast's powerful automation engine takes the heavy lifting off your team's shoulders, streamlining incident workflows. With that you can use smart alerting mechanisms for correlating and clubbing alerts, noise reduction and event intelligence to make sure your engineers get the relevant information to work on critical incidents.

We offer over 175 integrations, including Nagios, SolarWinds, AppDynamics, Grafana, Prometheus, ServiceNow, Jira, GitHub, Jenkins, and more. These integrations are developed based on customer requirements. Unlike other tools, we don't just add your request to a queue or park it indefinitely. This commitment to responsiveness is why we continually release new out of the box integrations every quarter.

Squadcast Monitoring Integrations

Squadcast brings in SRE features like Runbooks, Root Cause Analysis reports, Incident Postmortems, SLO Tracker and automated actions that reduce toil. Moreover it reduces your hassle to find a suitable solution for the status page. It allows you to host both public and private status pages for stakeholder communication. 

All of this and the Squadcast Mobile App too. So, Incident Response is under your control everywhere. 

This isn't an exhaustive list, but it highlights how Squadcast addresses specific pain points that might be driving your migration decision. You should definitely check the detailed top features here.

Planning Your Migration From PagerDuty

Migration isn't easy—there, I said it. But for experts who do it often, you should be in good hands. With us here’s how we move ahead with making a smooth transition. We can help you migrate from any Incident Management platform, including a seamless transition from PagerDuty. Many of our customers choose us over PagerDuty, and we have a specialized migrator to ensure a smooth and efficient migration process.

### Simplifying The Move With The Squadcast Migrator (Suitable For Pagerduty Users)

* Automated Migration Tool: For those migrating from PagerDuty, we offer a dedicated Squadcast Migrator tool. This tool streamlines the migration process by automatically transferring entities like user schedules, escalation policies, and services to Squadcast.

• Post-Migration Collaboration: Once the migration is complete, we collaborate with your team to set up event and service orchestration within Squadcast. This ensures a seamless transition from your old platform to the new.

Let us handle the heavy lifting, so you and your team can focus on what matters most – delivering exceptional services and applications.

This Squadcast webinar reveals successful migration steps and how Squadcast facilitates efficient Enterprise Incident Management with its top features.

Migration Prerequisites PagerDuty

1. Account Access: Provide read-only access to your PagerDuty account. This allows Squadcast to securely migrate your historical data for a seamless transition.
2. API Credentials: In some cases, depending on your current tool, API keys with read-only access might be required. This facilitates the secure transfer of your data to Squadcast. Check your specific tool's documentation for details on obtaining API credentials.

Squadcast Setup

Of course, you'll need a Squadcast account to get started. Squadcast offers a free trial, so you can explore the platform and its features before committing. You can get a trial of any plan between Pro, Premium, and Enterprise including specific integration requirements if any. Remember the idea of signing up to allow you to leverage the platform according to your desire, however you want it. Post that we can go ahead and give you a detailed demo at your request. 

Sign up for a free trial: Squadcast 

There will be certain things that would be required from your end. These include team list, single point of contacts for multiple teams, etc.

1. Team List: To ensure a smooth transition, create a list of all the teams that need to be migrated to Squadcast. This helps Squadcast understand the scope of the migration and plan accordingly.
2. Team SPOCs (Single Point of Contact): Identify a point of contact (SPoC) for each team being migrated. This SPoC will be the main liaison between the team and Squadcast during the migration process. They can answer questions, provide feedback, and ensure a smooth rollout for their team.

While not strictly a prerequisite, having a clear understanding of your current alert configurations and incident workflows can be helpful for replicating them (or improving upon them) within Squadcast. If you have any custom integrations with your current tool, discuss them with our team during the migration planning process. They can advise on the best approach for integrating those services with Squadcast.

Planning Your Migration From Other Tools

We understand that migrating to a new platform can feel daunting. That's why we take a collaborative approach to ensure a smooth and successful transition. We offer comprehensive migration services tailored to your specific needs. 

For a general migration, we start with a POC to understand your use case and requirements, followed by business requirements assessment, contract agreements, and a thorough review before proceeding with the migration. For PagerDuty migrations, we have a migrator in place as already discussed above and for other tools we handle the heavy lifting with assistance from your team, ensuring a smooth transition. 

Our process includes identifying Single Points of Contact (SPOCs), orchestrating event services, and a detailed review to ensure everything aligns with the initial POC discussions.

Here's a step-by-step breakdown of our migration process:

1. Partnership and Planning:

• Go-Ahead and Business Requirements: Once you decide to move forward with Squadcast, we work closely with you to finalize your specific business requirements and migration goals.
• Tailored Migration Plan: Based on your needs and timeline, we develop a customized migration plan that outlines the different phases of the migration process.

2. Phased Migration for Minimal Disruption:

• Gradual Rollout: We recommend a phased rollout approach, where we migrate teams or departments incrementally. This allows your team to adapt to Squadcast gradually and minimizes disruption to your daily operations.

3. Configuration Review and Optimization:

• Post-Phase Review: After each phase of the migration is complete, we schedule a review session with your team. This ensures your existing workflows and configurations are accurately replicated within Squadcast, potentially even optimized for better efficiency.

4. User Training and Support:

• Pre-Go-Live Training: We offer comprehensive training resources, including interactive tutorials, in-depth documentation, and on-demand webinars, to ensure your team feels confident using Squadcast before going live.
• Dedicated Customer Success Team: Throughout the entire process, our dedicated customer success team is available to answer your questions and provide ongoing support.

The Squadcast Advantage: Putting Your Needs First

At Squadcast, we believe in more than just providing a powerful reliability automation platform. We're committed to your success, and that starts with exceptional customer support. Here's what sets us apart:

24/7 Human Support

We understand that incidents can happen anytime, anywhere. That's why our top-notch customer support team is available 24/7 to answer your questions and address your concerns. No matter the time zone, you'll always reach a real person ready to assist you.

Multiple Support Channels

• Reach Out by Email: Prefer written communication? Feel free to send us an email with your questions. Our support team will respond promptly and work diligently to resolve your inquiry.
• Live Chat Support: Need immediate assistance while working within the Squadcast platform? Look no further than the chat window conveniently located at the bottom right corner of your screen. You won't be interacting with a chatbot; a real human Squadcast expert is there to answer your questions and guide you through any challenges.

Dedicated Account Management

From day one, you won't be left navigating the platform alone. You'll be assigned a dedicated account manager who will work closely with you to ensure your success. Your account manager will answer your questions, address your concerns, and work tirelessly to fulfill all your requirements within the Squadcast platform.

Seamless Migration and Training

Migrating to a new platform can be daunting. That's why we provide a dedicated implementation team to handle your entire migration process. They'll ensure a smooth transition and provide comprehensive training to your team before going live.

Custom Requirements with a Focus on Speed

Have specific needs that require a custom solution? Squadcast can handle that too! We understand that every organization is unique, and we're committed to finding solutions that fit your specific workflow. Our team boasts a rapid turnaround time for custom requirements, ensuring you can leverage the full potential of Squadcast quickly and efficiently.

## Customers Trust Squadcast

Don't just take our word for it! Squadcast is trusted by leading companies across various industries to streamline their Incident Management and reliability workflows. Visit our customer success stories to see how organizations like Charter, Kovai, Reddis, Macrometa, and more leveraged Squadcast to:

• Reduce alert fatigue and improve team productivity
• Simplify on-call scheduling and incident response
• Enhance collaboration and communication during outages
• Achieve faster MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution)

Kovai Success Metrics

These are just a few examples of how Squadcast empowers organizations to achieve reliability excellence. If you too want to achieve the best metrics, Squadcast is the way to go!

Making the Migration Smooth With Squadcast

Migrating from your current alerting and incident management tool can feel like a burden. But it doesn't have to be. You don’t need to worry about the move—we’ve got your back and will help you with the complete setup ensuring minimal disruption to your daily operations.

With Squadcast, you're not just getting a reliability automation platform; you're gaining a partner dedicated to your success. Contact us today to experience the Squadcast advantage!