Service Dependency Based De-duplication works on the logic that the incidents coming in for a Service and its dependencies have a related cause.

It is most likely the case where, when one Service has an incident, its dependent Service(s) may also have incidents and hence, you will be notified for the incident only once. This helps control unnecessary alert noise and notification fatigue during critical outages.

Defining dependencies between Services also helps Squadcast understand the relationship between your actual systems.

To understand this better, let us consider 3 Services: Service A, Service B and Service C.

If Service A is dependent on Service B and Service C, then:

• Dependent Service: Service A
• Dependency Service(s): Service B, Service C

Let’s say, Service B has an open incident at time x and Service C has an open incident at time x+1. Now, Service A receives an incident. This incident for Service A gets de-duplicated with the latest open incident of its depenedency Service(s) - i.e., with the open incident for Service C, in this case.

Prerequisites

• The User Role associated with the user in the Team must have required permissions to manage Services (ability to manage De-duplication Rules).

Adding a Service Dependency

Ensure that the right Team is chosen from the team picker on the top of the screen.

(1) Click on Services in the primary navigation

(2) To add a dependency where, Service A is dependent on Service B, for Service A, click on More options icon and select Dependencies

(3) Search for Service B, select it and click on Save

In this example, we have considered Backend Prometheus Service and Translations Services as dependencies of the Payment Portal Service.

This means that the Payment Portal Service is dependent on Backend Prometheus Service and Translations.

Enabling Service Dependency Based De-duplication

Once you have defined the Service Dependencies, you can set a Service Dependency Based De-duplication rule which would de-duplicate all incoming alerts for the chosen Service against the latest open incident of its Service Dependencies.

To do so:

(1) For the Service that has its dependencies defined, click on More and select De-duplication Rules

(2) For the De-duplication Rule that you want checked and applied for Service Dependency Based De-duplication, simply enable the checkbox If this service and a service it depends on both have an incident, alert only once.

Note: This checkbox for every De-duplication Rule is disabled by default.

Enabling Service Dependency Based De-duplication for a Specific Service Dependency

In cases where you would like Squadcast to consider just one of the many dependencies for a Service for Service Dependency Based De-duplication, you can follow the method below.

Along with enabling the Service Dependency checkbox as shown above, you will need to add the below condition to the rule:

past_incident.service == <slug_of_the_particular_dependency_service>

FAQs

(1) Where can one find the slug of a Service?

The slug of a Service is displayed on the Service card as shown below.

(2) Can I set up dependencies between Services that are in 2 different Teams?

No, you can set up dependencies only within Services for a given Team and not across Teams.