SquaredUp Live 2024: A round-up of our virtual customer workshop
Last week, we were very excited to host our second virtual customer workshop! We’d received so much positive feedback on last year’s debut that we knew we had to do it again.
Using the digital conferencing app Gather Town, we were pleased to welcome 89 attendees from 13 different countries to our virtual “SquaredUp Town”. Attendees got to meet the team, see real dashboards from other users, learn about upcoming products and features, and share their thoughts on the SquaredUp products. Read on to learn what we got up to.
Welcome keynote
Our CEO Richard Benwell kicked things off by welcoming everyone and sharing the ethos behind the event. A big focus around our approach to SquaredUp Live is community. We run a range of webinars and podcasts, but we see SquaredUp Live as a different sort of event – more like a gathering of likeminded individuals united around a shared purpose. It’s why we chose the interactive platform Gather.
“Perhaps you run infrastructure, or you’re focussed on application monitoring. Or maybe you’re a cloud engineer looking at costs, or you’re in the DevOps space. Whatever your role, you’re here because you’re using SquaredUp to transform the data you have into the insights you need for your business – and to create that single connected picture. That is SquaredUp’s mission in a nutshell. And that shared goal is what unites us as a community.
Hopefully today you’ll interact with SquaredUp staff, you’ll interact with our partners, and you’ll interact with each other. And you come away with some questions answered, new ideas and inspiration. And maybe a couple more friends that you know not just by name, but by face and voice as well.”
Dashboard stories
Next, we welcomed five SquaredUp users up on stage to share their dashboards and use cases. It was a carefully curated panel that covered various different use cases for SquaredUp.
Due to data sensitivity we are unable to share screen grabs or recordings. Here are some snippets from the session so you get the idea!
Speaker 1: Patrick Murphy
Senior System Engineer @ CDW, a technology products and services provider
“We got SquaredUp initially purely to dashboard SCOM. But as we’ve started to roll into the cloud, SquaredUp has continued to check all the boxes for us. Leadership noticed that we had dozens of monitoring tools across the different infrastructure teams – and at one point there was a push for us all to combine and use just the one. The problem is each product has its specialty. This is where SquaredUp has been an absolute home run with Leadership. It has become a visibility layer for not only SCOM, which I manage, but also a single pane of glass across all the other monitoring tools other teams are using.”
Speaker 2: Gert Lievens
Technical Cloud Architect @ Katoen Natie, a logistics service provider
“We needed dashboards that could provide a holistic view of our applications - which are in many cases very distributed, with components running in Azure and dependencies (like databases) running on premises. I was amazed at the number of data sources SquaredUp offers and how in a lot of cases it was plug and play.”
Speaker 3: André Ghanima
.Net and DevOps Developer @ Evidi, a managed services provider specializing in Microsoft
“We were on the hunt for a centralized dashboarding solution and we needed it to be scalable. SquaredUp checked every box. The flexibility and potential of SquaredUp’s huge range of data sources alongside the Web API and PowerShell plugins meant you’d always be able to bring the data in.”
There are four key dashboards Evidi use for each customer to monitor costs and health. These are used by the Evidi support team and also shared securely with the customer if necessary.
Speaker 3: Nathan Foreman
Principal Engineer @ SquaredUp
“We run SquaredUp entirely serverless on AWS and Azure, and we monitor the app in SquaredUp. We have dashboards built programmatically for each plugin where you can see errors by account, support tickets, Jira ticket deployments, DevOps changes, and more. We also have a dashboard for every customer to capture all their relevant information, including usage, in one place."
Speaker 4: Mike Halfcree
Customer Support Manager @ SquaredUp
“Rather than having to go into Zendesk to see what tickets are coming in and if we’re hitting our SLAs, we have summary dashboards that are easily accessible and also displayed up on the screens in the office. Active tickets, pending tickets, our CSAT are some things we monitor.”
"On a tangential note, we've also created a dashboard for the office displaying occupancy and air quality levels (CO2, temperature, humidity). All done via our new CSV plugin!"
That's all we can share – to be privy to the full stories next time you'll have to attend SquaredUp Live 😉 A massive thank you to Patrick, Andre, Nathan and Mike for sharing their stories with the community!
Product updates
After a break where attendees got to interact with the speakers in the lobby (like at a real-life event!), we broke off into two separate tracks for our product updates sessions – one for SquaredUp Cloud and one for Dashboard Server. If you attended one and are curious about what went on in the other, check out the recordings below!
SquaredUp Cloud roadmap
Dashboard Server roadmap
Plus bonus "Dashboard Server vs SquaredUp Cloud" comparison
Meet the experts
And finally, to round off an insightful community event, it was time to meet the people behind the product!
Attendees got to wander around a virtual product expo exploring different aspects of SquaredUp and chatting directly to the engineers and product managers who make it all happen.
We were also delighted to have our partner GripMatix join us in showcasing their new Citrix Logon Simulator management pack. GripMatix were the first third party vendor to create a SquaredUp Cloud plugin earlier this year! Their MP now comes with seamless dashboarding in SquaredUp.
Thank you SquaredUp community ❤️
And that's another year of SquaredUp Live done and dusted! A big thank you to the community for making it a lovely day of exploring, learning and connecting.
To close out, we'd like to share some of the lovely bits of feedback we received in our post-event survey:
“What excites us most about SquaredUp Cloud is the possibility for user access control so you can make dashboards for each customer. We are a hosting provider so that means a lot to us. Keep up the great work. Love your product and love talking to you guys.” – Jesper Breum, Monitoring Lead @ Sentia
“Great product =)” – Jan Pettersson, Technical Consultant, Umea University
“My favourite part was Bruce’s Dashboard Server and SquaredUp Cloud comparison.” – Olivier Tschopp, System Engineer @ Swatch Group
“The vast number of plugin/extensions to connect to data sources is exciting! This was a well-run event that was very interactive. Made it easy to go speak to the SQUP experts.” – Chris Gill, Senior Application Specialist @ Skipton Building Society
See you again next year. Until then, happy dashboarding!
