VictorOps Builds Serverless, Customizable Incident Management Solutions Using Twilio Functions
Time to read: 3 minutes
Servers are best when they’re upright. When they tip over, agile incident management allows companies to respond fast. VictorOps helps companies like Edmunds, Snapchat, and Crowdtap manage IT incidents the instant something goes wrong.
Twilio Functions to the Rescue
On-call teams responding to incidents work best when they have an alert system tailored to their team. VictorOps wanted to give each customer greater control over the incident alert flow by allowing them to include Live Call Routing functionality in their incident management process. To ship that feature into production, VictorOps explored numerous development and partnership options.
When VictorOps found Twilio Functions, they knew they could leverage it to rapidly deliver the level of flexibility they wanted for their customers. Twilio Functions allowed the seamless integration of Twilio Voice with the VictorOps platform — offsetting the need to develop a stand-alone Live Call Routing solution. This enabled VictorOps to deliver a differentiating call routing solution, faster, and at significant cost savings.
The benefits to VictorOps’ customers are twofold. First, using Twilio Functions serverless computing, VictorOps now provides an easily customizable solution for routing inbound calls according to team schedules and alert escalation policies. Second, costs saved by using Twilio Voice allow VictorOps to provide the service at up to 90% less than their competitor’s offers.
Giving Customers the Flexibility to Customize and Scale
For on-call teams, a phone call in the middle of the night is not the worst case scenario. It’s a proverbial bat-signal, calling the team into action. Not getting that call when you should is a far worse fate to suffer.
VictorOps ensures that when an incident happens, team members are alerted in the right order, and that alerts come through the right medium — SMS, phone call, or email. VictorOps customers run across the technological spectrum from an engineer who manages her company’s whole stack, to a COO who needs to be informed about breaks anywhere in the system.
“We heard from customers, ‘Hey we love your service, but my manager still has a Blackberry and needs to get in touch with ops when something goes wrong,’” says Nate Grieb, Product Owner at VictorOps. “They wanted the ability to manage every step of their alert flow — which team gets called in the event of a certain type of incident, who is alerted first and through what medium, who is alerted next if the initial contact doesn’t respond. And finally, whose Blackberry rings.”
VictorOps wanted to deliver this control to their customers without requiring them to re-invent the wheel. VictorOps’ philosophy was to let their customers stand on the shoulders of giants (or codebases in this case) giving customers the foundation they need to start from, while ensuring they have room to customize and scale.
VictorOps knew their customers needed flexibility enough to stretch their alert management flow all the way to a Blackberry. Twilio Functions helped them do just that.
Out-of-the-box, VictorOps provides customers with code to easily connect with Twilio Voice. From here, Twilio-powered numbers can be associated with teams and custom call flows in VictorOps — without requiring any code. Because Twilio-powered numbers are looped directly into VictorOps account, incidents can automatically be triggered and on-call teams notified based on an inbound call.
Savings In Cost, Engineering and Operations
For execution of live call routing functionality, Twilio Functions’ serverless environment allows VictorOps and their customers to write and run code straight from their Twilio account portal. No server provisioning is necessary for either party.
VictorOps’ build with Twilio Functions took one engineering team member approximately two weeks to build in Javascript. After just one week, the prototype was ready. Nate estimates VictorOps saved $60,000 in engineering hours, compared to building the same solution with Twilio Functions alternatives.
“You don’t have to comment out lines of code to explain what a function is doing. The Twilio code is really clear, and easily configured.”
The Twilio Advantage
“I think our implementation gives us a competitive advantage because it’s less costly and more flexible,” says Nate. Twilio Functions performs as VictorOps expects, but that’s only one side of the coin. Functions is priced in a manner that ensures VictorOps and their customers can scale financially.
Live Call Routing has been a feature in high demand at VictorOps. When Nate announced its release, he was met with a “roaring round of applause” from the VictorOps team. VictorOps customers are similarly thrilled.
Mike Walter, Senior Engineer at PLXIS says, “The VictorOps Live Call Routing feature has really helped PLXIS bring automation to our support number. This allows us to be more efficient and have a more effective way for our partners to reach our on-call engineers. We no longer have to manually update our on-call phone rotation, which was a painful and a difficult process.”
