SolarWinds Expands Incident Response With Squadcast Purchase

SolarWinds, the Texas company made famous by Russian intelligence hackers, bought an incident response automation vendor led by a former Freshworks consultant to detect, diagnose and resolve issues more efficiently.

See Also: Ransomware Detection: The case for Open NDR

The Austin-based observability and IT management software titan said its acquisition of San Francisco-based Squadcast will enhance operational response, improve mean time to resolution, and provide IT, DevOps and engineering teams with a stronger approach to incident management. The deal will help enterprises cut through alert noise, automate response workflows, and gain insights on service health.

“Observability alone isn’t enough,” Squadcast said in a statement. “While organizations invest heavily in monitoring and visibility, they often struggle with operationalizing that data, turning insights into real-time, automated response mechanisms.”

The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service in 2019 penetrated the SolarWinds corporate network, inserting malicious code into software updates for the company’s flagship Orion platform. A lawsuit by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accusing the firm of misleading investors is ongoing (see: SEC Moves to Get Foreign Testimony in SolarWinds Fraud Case).

Squadcast was founded in 2018, employs 55 people, and raised a $6 million pre-Series A investment from DNX Ventures in August 2021. The company has been led since inception by Amiya Adwitiya, who previously spearheaded investments in Freshworks, Chargebee and Blackbuck as a member of Accel’s investment team. SolarWinds executives weren’t available Monday for a telephone conversation (see: SolarWinds to Be Purchased By Turn/River Capital for $4.4B).

Where Traditional Observability, Monitoring Tools Fall Short

SolarWinds said traditional observability tools provide insights into system performance and health, but often lack automated response mechanisms to act on those insights effectively. By joining observability with incident response through its acquisition of Squadcast, SolarWinds said it aims to create a seamless workflow from detection to resolution, improving the ability of IT teams to manage system reliability.

“Most IT environments lack not only a unified, end-to-end view of a system’s health and performance but also the ability to efficiently remediate issues and provide meaningful business insights,” said Enterprise Strategy Group Principal Analyst Torsten Volk. “Despite investments in monitoring tools and platforms, organizations are struggling to maintain operational resilience.”

Similarly, SolarWinds said traditional monitoring tools often struggle with hybrid ecosystems, leading to siloed data and delayed incident response. The joining of Squadcast and SolarWinds will enable firms to boost visibility across on premise and cloud environments, use AI-driven automation to speed up incident detection and resolution, and unify monitoring and response processes to boost efficiency.

“For the first time, by uniting deep observability insights with proactive, automated incident response, this partnership will create a seamless bridge between detection and resolution, eliminating operational silos and accelerating issue remediation,” Squadcast said. “Enterprises can gain a unified reliability solution that detects performance anomalies in real time and assists with resolutions or fixes issues automatically.”

Effective incident management requires seamless collaboration across IT, DevOps and engineering teams, with siloed tools often slowing down resolution times because teams lack shared visibility into ongoing incidents. Squadcast’s live on-call management features and automated workflows makes incident response more structured and efficient by helping teams communicate in real-time.

“Squadcast is a critical tool in our support model,” Charter Chief Operating Office Kegan Adams said in a statement. “We primarily use it for on-call alerting but see massive potential for more capabilities.”

How Customers Will Benefit from the Squadcast Purchase

SolarWinds said Squadcast’s incident response platform helps organizations boost operational resilience by reducing alert noise and automating workflows, with customers reporting a 68% reduction in mean time to resolution, 1,000 work hours saved by reducing manual efforts required to manage alerts, and $500,000 in cost savings thanks to financial efficiency through automation.

“Since implementing Squadcast, we’ve reduced incoming alerts from tens of thousands to hundreds, thanks to flexible deduplication,” said Redis Senior Manager Avner Yaacov. “It has a direct impact on reducing alert fatigue and increasing awareness.”

With Squadcast’s AI-powered alert prioritization, SolarWinds said IT teams can isolate the most critical alerts, filter out unnecessary noise, and focus on urgent issues that impact system reliability, the firm said. AI automation in incident response also eliminates repetitive manual processes, enabling teams to focus on higher-value tasks like system optimization and long-term resilience planning, SolarWinds said.

“By optimizing incident response with AI, customers reduce noise, enhance efficiency, and resolve incidents faster—so they can focus on what truly matters,” Adwitiya said in a statement.

Squadcast and SolarWinds reassured users there will be no immediate changes to pricing, subscriptions, or service functionality, and existing ties with AWS, Azure, Slack and Microsoft Teams will remain supported. In the future, Squadcast users can expect deeper integrations with SolarWinds products, leading to enhanced monitoring, AI-powered insights, and automation capabilities.

“Joining SolarWinds will accelerate our mission to deliver intelligent, reliable, and scalable incident management solutions to engineering teams,” Adwitiya Squadcast wrote in a blog post. “Together, we’ll rethink what it means to create robust systems and provide operational excellence in a rapidly changing digital environment.”