Having the context of how similar issues were handled in the past can be invaluable. It can help incident responders grasp the nature of recurring problems, their causes, and effective solutions that have worked in the past. Introducing Squadcast’s Past Incidents feature that assists incident responders by presenting them with a list of similar past incidents related to the same service they are currently investigating.

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, swiftly responding to incidents is paramount for engineering teams. Downtime is not just costly; it can tarnish your organization's reputation. The pressure felt by engineering operations, DevOps, and SRE leaders to architect and run an effective incident response process is immense. Fortunately, over the last several years, effective engineering organizations have developed a standard toolkit for running a good incident response process.

A family member’s birthday, that concert you’ve waited all year to see, an impromptu weekend getaway with friends — there are a lot of reasons software engineers might want to switch on-call shifts. And rather than have to frantically send Slack messages to your teammates, wouldn’t it be nice to automate the process and quickly find the coverage you need?

If you’re just starting out in the world of incident response, then you’ve probably come across the phrase “post-mortem” at least once or twice. And if you’re a seasoned incident responder, the phrase probably invokes mixed feelings. Just to clarify, here, we’re talking about post-mortem documents, not meetings. It’s a distinction we have to make since lots of teams use the phrase to refer to the meeting they have after an incident.