Get started as an Account Owner
Start building your teams, integrate your tools and create on-call schedules, with Squadcast
Your Role as an Account Owner
You are responsible for the management of the overall configuration, workflow, user permissions, and billing. You are the root user of the organization.
Your Permissions as an Account Owner
You have access to all functionality across the platform including scheduling, integrations, teams, user permissions, and billing.
To begin, configure your profile:
Navigate to the My Profile section to define your contact information, time zone, and notification preferences.
After you’ve set up your profile, you can head over to the Incident Notifications Rules section, to create your paging policies.
Important:
Verify your contact information to start receiving notifications from Squadcast.
🔹 Best Practice Tip 🔹 Use the mobile application to receive push notifications. The app gives you instant access to all details and actions.
🔹 Best Practice Tip 🔹 Your primary notification rule should be the most attention-grabbing notification method. We recommend using a diverse notification rule (Push, SMS, Phone, Email) with multiple steps to avoid single points of notification failure.
🔹 Best Practice Tip 🔹 Use a custom notification rule during business hours, that may not require aggressive notifying.
🔹 Best Practice Tip 🔹 Include a phone call in the last step of your notification rule, as a surefire way of getting alerted and acknowledging the incident.
Explore the mobile and web platforms to get comfortable before beginning your configurations.
Next, start adding users and stakeholders to your organization. You can manually add each user or bulk import them using a .csv file. Alternatively, you can automatically provision them using an SSO.
🔹 Best Practice Tip 🔹 Configuring SSO before adding users helps ensure all users link their SSO account. Squadcast supports any SAML 2.0-based Single Sign-On (SSO) and you can set it for your Organization by following this integration guide here.
🔹 Best Practice Tip 🔹 For larger teams, the best way to add users would be to bulk import them using a .csv file.
🔹 Best Practice Tip 🔹 Make sure that all users have verified their emails and phone numbers as soon as they are added, to start receiving notifications.
Once you have added users to your organization, you can customize their access to the account by adding additional permissions. These are additional levels of permissions, on top of the User Type that they have been added as. You can only customize permissions for users and not stakeholders.
🔹 Best Practice Tip 🔹 Make sure to give the right org-level permissions to the right team members to have better visibility in the system settings.
Next, create teams to segregate data and have different environments for different functional teams. By default, all the users are added to the default team. The default team cannot be deleted.
🔹 Best Practice Tip 🔹 Keep a team naming convention that is intuitive to each team role or the alerts they work with. (ie. Support, Backend, Security, Data, etc.).
🔹 Best Practice Tip 🔹 Organize your teams according to the service they are responsible for. They will be able to manage their integrations and the whole alerting flow for themselves.
Next, assign roles in a Team from within Squadcast Roles: Admin, Users, and Observers, or create custom roles.
🔹 Best Practice Tip 🔹 Restrict user access as much as possible to limit the number of users making changes. Recommendation: 1-2 admins per team, the rest as users or stakeholders.
🔹 Best Practice Tip 🔹 Make use of the custom roles/edit the default roles and give correct access to the right team member.
🔹 Best Practice Tip 🔹 Stakeholders added to teams can only carry the role of an Observer.
Squads are sub-groups that can refer to folks handling a specific functionality, service, or project within the team. Squads are handy when you need to notify the whole group together. For instance, when a coordinated response is required for high-urgency high-complexity incidents, or at the end of an escalation policy when nobody has acknowledged it.
Examples:
- Payment gateway Squad
- Backend Squad
- Frontend Squad
- All Hands
Once teams are created, you can set up your on-call schedules. An on-call schedule is used to determine who is on-call at a given time. They are based on different time zones and configurable rotations.
Important:
They are active only when added to an escalation policy.