Qlik Mitigates Incidents Faster With FireHydrant’s All-in-One Alerting and Incident Management Platform

Qlik®, a global leader in data integration, analytics, and AI, empowers over 40,000 customers worldwide to convert complex data landscapes into actionable insights.

The company has experienced rapid growth through its increasing customer base, employee count, and strategic acquisitions. At the same time, the SRE team has adopted a DevOps "you build it, you run it" philosophy, empowering developers to take greater ownership of their services and incidents. FireHydrant has been key to supporting both their DevOps transition and rapid company growth, providing alerting and incident management tools to streamline their response, ensure consistency across teams, and enable any developer to confidently respond to incidents.

"FireHydrant is a world-class tool, mastering incident response and excelling with adding modern alert management,” said VP of Engineering at Qlik, Ben Pocek.

Reducing Toil: Automating Incident Management at Scale

FireHydrant’s powerful automation capabilities, including pre-configured Slack channel and Zoom meeting setups, have reduced manual communications — freeing incident commanders to focus entirely on troubleshooting. Markus Meyer, a member of Qlik’s SRE team, estimates that FireHydrant saves the team 5 to 10 minutes per incident — a significant time savings given the large scale of their operations.

“With the automation in FireHydrant, we’ve been able to reduce the time to mitigate an issue, which is the most important thing to keep customers happy,” Markus said.

FireHydrant has also helped Qlik by providing clear, visible role assignments for all incident participants. “Now, with FireHydrant, we have the right tool to show transparent information for everyone — who’s the commander, who’s the SME, who’s the responder. That helps us a lot,” said Meyer.

Through the combination of automation and clear role assignments, FireHydrant has empowered Qlik’s developers to take ownership of their services, fostering a culture of accountability and enabling them to respond more efficiently to incidents.

Seamless Alerting to Incident Response With Signals

In addition to incident management, Qlik has adopted FireHydrant’s on-call and alerting product, Signals, to centralize alerts and seamlessly integrate incident response. Previous solutions lacked automation or were limited to basic paging functionality.

With Signals, Qlik now has a seamless alerting and on-call solution that integrates directly with their incident workflows. By routing alerts efficiently and providing clear visibility into who is responsible, FireHydrant ensures that Qlik’s teams can respond quickly and effectively with a unified platform for both alerting and incident resolution while delivering significant cost savings.

Enhanced Retrospectives and Insights

FireHydrant also plays a crucial role in how Qlik conducts retrospectives, bringing consistency and structure to their post-incident learning. Qlik now has a centralized system that ensures everyone is using the most current templates — enabling the team to seamlessly collaborate on the retrospective.

But when it comes to post-incident analysis, Qlik takes it a step further. As with many large organizations, customization was a top priority when choosing an incident management platform. Using FireHydrant’s robust API, they pull incident data directly into their own Qlik platform to develop dashboards and analyze their alerts to reduce noise and improve their alerting process.

A Game Changer in Incident Management

Qlik’s experience highlights FireHydrant’s ability to meet the needs of large, complex organizations. By automating workflows, clarifying responsibilities, and enabling powerful integrations, FireHydrant has empowered Qlik to respond to incidents with greater speed.

“The automation, the runbooks that we can define, the ability to pull service teams automatically into channels — it’s all been a really good thing,” Markus said.

For a company like Qlik, whose mission is to enable better decisions and drive strategic business outcomes for customers around the world, FireHydrant provides the reliability and scalability needed to deliver on their vision.