Adding a Service

Effortlessly add a new service and integrations for incident notifications - A step-by-step guide to creating and configuring a service for efficient incident management.

A Service is a core component of your infrastructure/application for which alerts are generated.

Services in Squadcast represent specific systems, applications, components, products, or teams for which an incident is created. To check out some of the best practices for creating Services in Squadcast, refer to the guide here.

Prerequisites

• The User Role associated with the user in the Team must have required permissions to manage Services.

• You need to have at least one Escalation Policy before you can add Services.

• The number of Services that can be added to an Organization is determined by the plan that your account is currently on.

Creating a Service

1. Navigate to Services -> Click on Add New Service. On the next screen, you will be guided through two steps.

2. Define Service: Enter the Name and Description based on the function that the service provides. Select an existing Escalation Policy and Owner. Enter Tags, and Click Save and Continue.

How to pick an Owner?

Typically, an owner of a Service is well versed with the architecture, design and dependencies of the service. Assigning an owner helps others in the team know who they can reach out to should they need help with anything.

How to use Tags?

Use tags to organize, classify and add context to your services. We recommend using tags like Type, Environment, Functionality and Priority to make them more context-rich.

Examples, Environment: PROD, Severity: Sev1, Type: Technical.

Tips

• Give your services meaningful names that reflect the actual component name or functionality like - Login, Checkout, Payment API

• You can also assign a Squad as the owner of a service

• You can use tags to differentiate between business and technical services

3. Add Alert Source: Select the integration(s) you use to send alerts to this service from the search bar, dropdown, or from a list of our most popular integrations.

If you chose to add an integration to your service, you will now be in the service’s Integrations tab, where you’ll find the integration guide and an integration key. Follow the integration guide instructions to complete the configuration. Once you have completed the integration guide instructions, your service configuration is now complete.

4. Click on Done to Create a New Service.

Note: Ensure that the right Team is chosen from the team picker on the top of the screen (which is also visible as a display tag again on the top of the Create Service screen).

Note: You can create and manage a service using our latest Terraform provider (1.0.4). To view our Terraform documentation, click here.

Edit Service Setting

To edit an existing service’s settings:

1. Navigate to Services -> Service Overview -> select or search for your desired service.

2. Click on the service to navigate to the Service Details page.

3. In the top right, click More -> Edit Service.

4. Once you have edited your preferred settings, click Save Changes.

Edit a Service’s Escalation Policy

To edit a service’s escalation policy:

1. Navigate to Services -> Service Overview -> select or search your desired service.

2. Click on the service to navigate to the Service Details page.

3. In the top right, click More -> Edit Service.

4. Under the escalation policy drop-down, search and select an escalation policy.

5. Click Save Changes.

Delete Service

To delete an existing service:

1. Navigate to Services -> Service Overview -> select or search for your desired service.

2. Click on the service to navigate to the Service Details page.

3. In the top right, select More -> Delete Service.

4. You will receive a prompt, click on Yes, Delete Services.

It will delete your Service.

If your Service has any open (triggered/ acknowledged) incidents, the system will not allow service deletion until those incidents are resolved. Click on Show Open Incidents to resolve and follow the same steps stated above to delete the service.

To resolve multiple incidents in one shot, check out the Take Bulk Actions documentation

Add Integrations to an Existing Service

You can add more than one integration on a service, which allows you to represent the actual entities you are monitoring, managing, and operating as services. The list of supported alert source integrations is available here.

To add an Alert Source Integration to your service:

1. Navigate to Services -> Service Overview -> select or search for your desired service.

2. In the extreme right, expand the accordion -> In the Alert Sources section, Add Alert Source.

3. Select the integration(s) you use to send alerts to this service from the search bar, dropdown, or from our most popular integrations list.

4. Click Add Alert Source.

5. Now your alert source is added, copy the Webhook URL.

6. Follow the Integration Guide to complete configuring the desired alert source.

How to send alerts from a source I don’t see here?

In cases where you want to send custom alerts that don’t come from any tools listed here, you can use our Incident Webhook or our Email integrations.

Tips:

• Incident auto-resolution is enabled by default provided the alert source supports it.

• Email as an alert source does not support incident auto-resolution.

• Reduce alert noise at the source end by sending in just actionable alerts that you want your on-call team to work on.

• When not possible at the source end, use automation rules to group, suppress, tag, and route incidents intelligently.