Everbridge IT Alerting Reviews

One key aspect of the solution is that it can send information very quickly and is connected to different nodes.

The solution's non-targeted communication with external parties could be enhanced.

I have been using Everbridge IT Alerting for three to four years.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

Everbridge IT Alerting is an easily scalable solution.

I rate the solution a seven or eight out of ten for scalability.

Reaching the technical support team is sometimes very easy, and other times, it takes a little time.

Neutral

We wanted to have a tool implemented to include the setup. It went well, and there was no big disruption in how it was implemented.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup a seven or eight out of ten.

The solution was deployed in our organization in three months.

Everbridge IT Alerting is a cost-efficient solution.

We are using Everbridge IT Alerting for incident and crisis modules. The tool is powerful in itself, but as with any tool, you need to adapt it to the organization to be suitable for managing specific situations. When we did the analysis, Everbridge IT Alerting was one of the main products in the markets adapted to our organization's expectations. Currently, we are using it for a different aspect.

Overall, the solution gives a better understanding of the incident response aspect. It helps manage that kind of situation. The solution's detection and escalation features are crucial in reducing downtime. The solution's automation capabilities help quickly identify the right members and skills.

Everbridge IT Alerting is deployed on the cloud in our organization. We tried to make the solution more independent. However, we tried one or two integrations, and they went well. You need to have the right skills to integrate the solution with other tools. I would recommend the solution to other users based on their industry and business requirements.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Currently, we use it for two different things. One is from an intel perspective where, within VCC, we have the assets plotted. So, if something does occur, we can see where our assets are in relation to where a risk event occurs. The other one is for business continuity. If there is a potential crisis, we send a notification using Everbridge, but we use it through another program called Fusion. So, we send an Everbridge notification activating the crisis response team.

We are currently using a customized version that doesn't have all the capabilities that Everbridge normally has, and we are now transitioning to software as a service. Currently, it isn't a cloud deployment, and that's the reason why we don't have some of the data supporting it. It doesn't have data sources and a whole bunch of other stuff that I know that we should be using. We use VCC, and then we use the regular platform to send notifications, but the data isn't as customizable. Things such as data sources and stuff behind it aren't there. It still has HR data incorporated into it but not the actual data sources. I can't see why these alerts are coming, other than little snippets that show that it comes from the news or whatever the general source is. I can't actually link to it or adjust the data sources. That's why I'm encouraging them to go to the updated version because of the additional capabilities.

It's much easier to determine the impact, especially as we're developing a crisis management program. One of the things that the program was lacking and the reason why I was hired is that they need to develop it. They didn't have thresholds or criteria set. So, they were trying to respond to everything all of the time with no standards, structure, thresholds, or criteria set. Everbridge is one of those tools that you can use to identify potential impact.

I personally love VCC because I just think there needs to be more data to support it so we can be more proactive and easily assess the impact. So, I appreciate the visual aspect, but it has to have the data to support it. It has proved very useful, particularly because we have a GSOC that's not technically 24/7. We do have an 800 number that people call 24/7. If something happens, they can easily send Everbridge a notification to activate the team off hours. It is useful in that respect too. We use it in conjunction with teams, but off-hours and for additional people outside of the core team, we use Everbridge, which is useful.

I've worked closely with Everbridge teams in my previous positions too, and the one thing I would like to see is the distance. You have to measure it, and it's not really accurate. If we could have a general distance within the alert itself to tell us where the closest asset is, it would be useful. That's one thing I'd like to see.

I have been using this solution for five to six years.

It seems stable.

It is definitely scalable. It just gets expensive.

We have different teams, and I'm not really sure about the number of users. My guess would be around 30.

Their support is good. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

We switched because there is more capability in one place. We were using Dataminr. Dataminr is weird because it has different functions, but they're trying to become a direct competitor in all capabilities. Dataminr is now morphing to mass notification and other capabilities. We still use Dataminr, and I have used it in previous positions too because it tends to be more timely, but there's a lot more noise. It didn't have the notification portion of it, but now they're getting that capability.

For mass notification, I've used OnSolve and Send Word Now. I can't remember all the ones I've used.

I wasn't here when they set it up. I would guess that it was probably complicated.

I do not know about the licensing costs, but I know they're in groups, and there are permission caps. For example, you can have five admin accounts, and anyone can receive a notification. There's a mobile component too, which I find particularly useful, but it has to be a part of the contract. 

Have money and also be very involved in the implementation because it's only as good as the data that you put behind it to support it. So, know your overall objective. Are you using it for mass notification? Are you using it for situational awareness and real-time monitoring? Know what you're looking for and then make sure that you implement it correctly to support what you're trying to get out of it.

I would rate it a nine out of ten because it's not as timely as some of the other data sources, but I know the reason why it is like that. You're not seeing everything all the time because they're trying to make it more useful and have context behind it.

I manage the product a little bit. I don't have a great deal to deal with it hands-on. Our company uses it on behalf of other organizations. We have an emergency call center, and companies will call in, and our call center will activate notifications on their behalf via Everbridge.

It's mainly for mass notification and pooling of contacts. Pooling of customers is valuable.

I know that we get frustrated at the capacity of SMS messages. It's not very long, and if you want to send a long message, they end up sending you a link to the rest of the message.

It's not easy to add on extra capabilities.

I have been using Everbridge IT Alerting for about three years.

I'd rate Everbridge IT Alerting a seven out of ten in terms of stability.

I'd rate Everbridge IT Alerting a six out of ten in terms of scalability. Some customers want extra modules from Everbridge and not just the mass comm features. We find it a little bit awkward to add on extra capabilities.

Our customers are large companies. We've got five companies and about 450 users across those five companies. In our organization, we have about 15 people who work with this solution.

I'd rate Everbridge's support an eight out of ten.

Positive

It's a SaaS deployment. I'd rate it a seven out of ten in terms of the ease of setup.

We have a central Everbridge contract, and we just set up a new customer within Everbridge. It probably only takes us two weeks.

I have two people for deployment.

It's a seven out of ten for us in terms of pricing. We've just gone through a process of looking at other solutions.

I'd advise doing a proof of concept and looking at what else is out there. You need to find the best fit for you. Everbridge could be that, but there are also other products.

Overall, I'd rate Everbridge IT Alerting a seven out of ten. 

We are using it for IT alerting. It is for contacting on-call personnel. 

We are most probably using its most recent version.

I manage the platform, and I don't really use it. The scheduling aspect of it is valuable where you create your groups and then either manually or via API call, you can initiate an alert. It'll look at the schedule and only contact those people who are on-call. So, it takes the guesswork out.

You have to create schedules in Everbridge. It would be better if it could tie into an existing solution, such as Microsoft Exchange or Google Calendar, so that you don't have to create it in both places. That's one thing it lacks right now. You can't just say, "Hey, look at this Microsoft calendar. That's what we want to use." You have to create it in Everbridge.

There are no direct integrations into the Microsoft universe in terms of the scheduling and some of their single sign-on. They have it, but their mobile app requires additional information to be provided besides the single sign-on information.

We've been using it for about five years.

As far as I know, they haven't had an issue with it. So, it is pretty reliable.

There are probably only 20 people who use it. They are on the operations side.

They answered my questions. It was more of a knowledge-type inquiry, not necessarily a problem, but we rarely have to use their support. So, it is pretty reliable and intuitive.

It was pretty straightforward.

We use professional services to set it up. Everbridge has its own team.

For maintenance, we have a small team with two or three people.

I haven't really compared a lot of others. We did that initially, but that was over five years ago. The renewal invoice comes in, and REP handles that. So, I don't know what it costs per user.

If you don't have time, you should definitely use professional services. However, you should just stay on top of them so that the project keeps moving along.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

We use Everbridge for IT on-call management of both P1 issues (through our integration into our ServiceNow platform) and on-demand P2 bridges. These are generated by our critical incident management team, which leverages our Skype (and soon Teams) environments.

When an incident occurs, the appropriate on-call calendars are hit and the critical incident team coordinates the issue as it is worked to a solution. 

Each of the groups has one or two group managers who keep the calendar up to date and assist on-call personnel who have questions about how to interact with the platform. 

Everbridge IT Alerting accelerated the time to engage with our IT support staff. Our incident management team benefited by pulling the right personnel at any given time to troubleshoot serious IT issues. 

The interactive dashboard shows the state live, of who has joined and who is being contacted. The reporting that can be generated afterward also supports how teams responded to the system.

Everbridge IT Alerting also has a robust API which we have used for other monitoring systems to send to. The commands can be easily tested in Swagger.

The integration to ServiceNow via the store app synchronizes our assignment groups within ServiceNow to groups within Everbridge, saving time for group managers needing to add personnel to on-call calendars. The groups->calendars feature helps scope each group manager's efforts in managing on-call resources.

The incident templates have a lot of flexibility in managing the behavior of an incoming incident, including what devices to contact and the user experience in general. 

The post mortem reports are descriptive, indicating who joined the call and when.

Parts of the mobile app are a bit difficult to navigate (to see published calendars, for example) and there can be some confusion if you also license Everbridge Mass Notification at your company.

The incident templates can get complex and hard to troubleshoot, so it helps to focus on keeping it simple.

We have been using Everbridge IT Alerting for approximately four years.

We used xMatters and switched, as we had licensed Everbridge Mass Notification already and found that xMatters was complex to manage.

Licensing cost is driven largely by the number of users in the platform including admins, group managers, and message senders, so you want to consider your needs there. 

Everbridge did a good job on onboarding support, conducting multiple working and Q&A sessions which helped enable our success.

We evaluated xMatters as well.

Everbridge IT Alerting appears to be a straightforward product at first glance. Be sure to have adequate training both for starting administrators as well as for group managers, message senders, and of course for on-call personnel (contacts).

Our primary goal is to find an enterprise-wide notification solution so I'm looking at multiple solutions to find a product that could solve, say, 80% of our notification needs. We've just rolled out Everbridge. My involvement is more at the strategy level, determining whether the contract is good enough from a financial standpoint and those kinds of things. I'm the principal architect and we are customers of Everbridge. 

I think it's a robust solution with multiple modules that can be leveraged. I am looking at rationalizing the application landscape as we have too many applications in our enterprise to be able to manage them effectively. I'm trying to consolidate. What they've done until now has been very good. They've been very responsive and very helpful in answering questions. 

The customization of messages might be one area that they can improve on. For example, if I'd like to do a hyper-focused customized message within a campaign for each and every individual notification, that is something I don't believe they support right now. 

I've been using this solution for about four months. 

The solution is quite new for us so it's hard to comment on stability. We haven't had any problems till now. 

As mentioned, we have around 40,000 users so the solution is easily scalable. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

This is not a cheap solution. Our current license is for around 40,000 employees and contractors. In the future we may evaluate expanding that to cover a larger customer base.

This product has certain functionalities that make it a lucrative solution and platform. It's geared towards big companies. I'm not involved in implementation, my role is more at the strategy level.

I would rate the solution quite highly, an eight out of 10. 

We use this product for engagement to critical outages, so we use the smart bridge functionality. All of our entire support staff is in Everbridge. Anybody and everybody that we need to get ahold of from a production perspective is in Everbridge, and we use it to engage them. This can be both singularly as an individual or as a group, and it has a calendar that escalates up the chain.

If a primary or secondary don't respond within a given amount of time, it'll go all the way up to, in our case, the VP, which is what's required by our organization.

We also use it to send out notifications to support staff, if they have a ticket in their queue that hasn't been assigned to somebody after given an allotment of time. I think it's about 30 minutes. So, if a ticket is sitting unassigned, it'll notify that team saying, "Hey, you've got a ticket out there", and they can actually respond to that particular text message saying, "yes, I accept".

At that point, Everbridge will then tell ServiceNow that this support person has accepted the ticket, and ServiceNow will then assign that ticket to that person. So, they don't even have to log into the system in order to do that.

We also are using it under certain conditions for critical alerts. If we've got a set of alerts set up such that if one of these is triggered, something imminent is going to happen, then it will engage both a SWAT team and my incident command team at the same time, stating that a bridge needs to be set up immediately for this particular issue. Everbridge does all that for us.

It also does incident subscriptions. For example, if you want to be alerted for a given platform, for a given priority, it'll send you a notification saying, "Hey, there's an issue in your platform". We send communications through it, which are self-serve from the business perspective, stating that, again, what type of platform or application that you want to be notified on. If there's an issue in that particular platform or app, you will get the notification, again, that something is going on and all of the details thereof.

It is also selected by priority, so if you want only to know about the priority one, twos, you can select just those. Or if you want to know about the non-majors, threes and fours, you can also opt into those.

The most valuable feature is the support calendars.

In the past, in my previous company, we actually did a survey and we spent over 45 minutes trying to notify and engage personnel for any given major incident. Everbridge has managed to actually reduce that to under three minutes.

Even in my new company, our engagement time is sitting right around three minutes to engage personnel to a critical outage. This means that we don't have to spend time finding out who the on-call is, or find out what their contact information is. If they don't respond, we don't have to look up their manager or their director or their VP. Everbridge does that all behind the scenes and quickly.

We are just getting into smart orchestration, which I don't have much experience with yet but I am pretty sure that I will be learning a lot about it within the next year. To this point, it has saved us time compared to my previous experience with deployment.

I would like to have a little bit more flexibility in the member portal. For example, if you are set up with primary and secondary and those individuals just want to swap, where the secondary will take the primary position, and the primary we'll take the secondary, that's not possible through the member portal. Instead, a manager actually has to go into the calendar itself and do that flip. All other vacations or swaps can be handled from the member portal.

All other vacations or swaps can be handled from the member portal, as long as they aren't on the same day. If you want to swap with somebody next week then you can do it from the member portal, but if you're both working the same day then you can't do that flip.

I have been using Everbridge IT Alerting for more than three years. The company that I currently work for has only been using it for about a year.

They're actually very good at fixing bugs or getting updates because they've made modifications to their calendar, to the escalations to be more flexible. So far they've checked off most of my request requirements on my list.

Considering how often we use it and the number of tickets we send through, it's very stable. The redundancy that they have is good.

We send a lot of tickets through it and I think that it scales well. In one year, we had 243,130 tickets processed by the system.

You can implement what pieces you need. We started out with the API, which is a very simple integration between ServiceNow and Everbridge. Then you have Smart Orchestration, which allows you to have more control on the Everbridge side than the ServiceNow side. This is what we wanted.

Initially, we started out with just engaging for support teams. Then, that has grown into sending instant subscriptions to technical managers and executives, and that expanded into sending communication notifications to the business. From there, it is expanding to opening up a secondary informational bridge that runs in parallel to your technical bridge, all through the same platform. So you've got your business users on one bridge allowing them to not interfere with the technical investigation being held on the technical bridge.

Our communication platform actually starts in one week. We've got it all built out and we activate it next week. But, we are constantly looking at integrating more. So, to spec what we want to do with it, we're at 100%. But, say next month we find another critical alert that we need to have an immediate response on, we'll integrate that into the system.

We're constantly looking for ways to better utilize the functionality of Everbridge into everything that we do.

The technical support is very good. Whenever I've got an issue, I talk to either support or my direct contacts. My Account team on the Everbridge side, along with the person that helped us install, I've got direct lines too and they are very responsive.

Their Command Center, their Service Desk, is also very responsive. You can actually do a ticket online and they usually respond to you within 24 hours that way. There's an 800 number that you can call for immediate assistance if it's something that needs to be done ASAP. They take down the information and do the initial investigation and usually have some sort of response to you.

In my typical case, it's usually by end of the day when I get a response. In some form, either that they're still investigating or that they've found something and are turning it over to level two or something like that. They do keep us informed.

They take every issue you have to heart and dive into it as far as they can. If you don't like the answer they've come back with, they will continue to dig into it, to our satisfaction.

In my previous company, that's one reason why it took us 45 minutes to engage personnel. It was all manual. At this company, I do not know what they had prior to Everbridge.

I was involved in the setup at my previous company and I felt that it was a straightforward process. The hardest part is actually getting the calendars out into Everbridge. If your support team has a standard rotation, no matter how complex that standard rotation is, it's very easy to build that out in Everbridge.

It's when you have groups that don't have any type of standard rotation. Getting them to move to that when they're used to working off a spreadsheet and they prefer working off a spreadsheet, can be a difficult transition because now they're going to a tool.

The API integration was a little tricky in ServiceNow, but I don't know if that was due to Everbridge or my ServiceNow. We did get it worked out and again when I say it was tricky, it took us an extra a couple of weeks because we found some nuances that we weren't expecting. It took us a while to track that down and get that switched.

Now, going to Smart Orchestration, which is what we are implementing right now, so far has gone much smoother than what the API integration was. Mainly I think because I and my partner have access to actually see what the Smart Orchestration is doing versus with ServiceNow, the admins did that. It was out of our control and we didn't know what was going on behind the scenes.

With respect to how long it took us to deploy, I want to say it probably took about three months. We thought it was going to take us about a month to two months through the API, but it took us three because we ran into a little snag.

In comparison, for this Smart Orchestration, we actually have fewer resources working on it and we've only been working at it for about a month and I'm told that we're just about done. It has taken a third of the time and fewer resources.

In terms of the deployment strategy, we had very similar work streams that we wanted to accomplish through this. We wanted to send engagements under certain conditions, and implement call-outs under certain conditions. In fact, under Smart Orchestration, we have even more work streams going than what we did through the API. I wouldn't say that it was more complex this time around, but it's larger. There are more ways of triggering events through Smart Orchestration than what we set up with the API.

We used an Everbridge consultant to assist us with the deployment, and it was very helpful. This person is very knowledgeable and we had the same one for both deployments. It may have made this deployment even faster because we know each other.

There are 16 of us that are active, using it on a daily bases. My team is eight and the communication team is, I think, six. There are four people who take an administrative role, including myself, my counterpart, and two of my teammates. The administrators can actually go into the tool and work.

From a group manager perspective, I've got just shy of 2,500 people as support team members in the system. I have 259 groups, each with a corresponding administrator to maintain schedules.

Well, considering I save 42 minutes per outage, coupled with customer satisfaction, I would say it is well worth the cost to me. It's always an intangible, but I think it far pays for itself many times over, each year.

Everbridge is not an inexpensive tool, but as the adage says, you get what you pay for. Everbridge stands behind its product and in my three years, I think it had issues once that affected my company, and that was only briefly. Considering how many tickets I run through, in my book that is definitely a five-nines type of scenario.

In the past when we initially signed up, SMS was free. However, due to the new legislation in certain countries and whatnot, they had to make some changes to that, so they've gone to a message credit. There is now a possibility that you could incur SMS costs, depending on how often and where you're sending things. Otherwise, their fees are pretty self-explanatory.

The service is subscription-based and you've got two different user licensing schemes. One-way and two-way. One-way is very inexpensive and I don't know the pricing. Two-way is a lot more expensive. Hypothetically, it might be $1 for a one-way license, but it's $12 for a two-way license.

One-way means that you're not in a calendar essentially, I think is the way they describe it. So, you are not being pooled into an outage bridge, which means that you're not in a rotation of some sort. A one-way also means that you're just getting a notification saying, "Oh, Hey, here's an issue that we're going to tell you about," but you aren't going to be pooled into something that says, "Oh, Hey, I want your assistance to resolve this." Whereas a two-way license says, "Okay, hey, here's the issue. I need you on this bridge and you need to be there in less than three minutes."

Before choosing Everbridge, I looked at others including xMatters, MIR3, and there's another one too and I can't remember the name of it. Ultimately, Everbridge is what we felt fit what we wanted better.

MIR3, which is now known as OnSolve, just wasn't evolved far enough. Their functionality just wasn't anywhere close to what we needed it to be. They did not have bridge functionality. xMatters, at the time, did not either. I'm sure that they probably do today but at the time, xMatters could not stand up a bridge. It would have to be an external issue and we wanted everything under one platform.

There's something different with the calendar functionality, too. But since it was three years ago, I honestly don't remember. In any case, the main parts were the bridge functionality that Everbridge had at the time was far superior to both xMatters and MIR3. The engagement between xMatters and Everbridge was pretty similar. They both were very robust as far as trying to get the people that you want to get.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Everbridge is to do your homework. Make sure you know what you want to implement and why. If you have a clear path forward, then the implementation is pretty straight forward.

Also, if you use Everbridge to help implement, listen to what they have to say. They know the tools inside and out and may have a better way of implementing it than what you might have thought.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Everbridge is that doing it manually is a waste of time and resources. It has given my team more the ability to focus on what it needs to, on resolving the issues. This has allowed us to cut our mean time to respond, leading to a reduction in our mean time to resolve. Basically, when you don't have to worry about your people and the escalation going on behind the scenes, it allows you to focus on what really matters in clearing out the outage.

In summary, this is a really good product but there is always room for improvement. In my opinion, they are really close.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it to alert management of priority-one incidents. The company uses it for global incidents but we have a subset of it for priority-one incidents, to let IT management know what is going on and so IT knows it's priority-one. The future is to let them know about priority-ones, twos, and threes, for the on-call schedule. But right now we're in the priority-one stage.

For the P1s especially, we had a lot of incidents where we got notifications that things were going down, and just the time it took to get people on the call - the bridge - and to get people to respond sometimes took as much as half-an-hour or 45 minutes. Now it's really down to 15 to 20 minutes. So the response time in getting teams together is much better, much more effective.

At this stage, which is step one - and we're going to try to get better - we have incidents once a week. On each of those incidents we have to do calls on root analysis and why it happened. From that standpoint, we get people on a call much faster to get it resolved much faster. In turn, the calls are becoming less and less. We're down to once a week. We want to get down to once a month.

A better response time helps you learn what's going on and how to prepare for the next time. For example, knowing that in January we had an incident where Asia/Far East went down because the things we were doing at night caused that slowness and lag time, we realized that we if changed things that we do at night in America, we wouldn't have the lag time going on in Asia. We realized that the things we were doing in America were affecting the next day in Asia.

It helps us get everybody involved, the first, the second, and treasury, where normally, to get even one person on the line was difficult. I work at night, from 7:00 PM to 7:00 AM, and that's the hardest time to get somebody on the line and get them actively involved. But they know that when they get that call from Everbridge - and if they don't answer it goes to their home phone, it goes to their cell phone - it is important that they get on. It's not just a call for general information. They know if it's an Everbridge call that it's something very important and that their manager is looking at it. That puts us in a better place. When there is a call, they respond.

For us, the most valuable features are the alerting and messaging, SMS messaging and text. We have a 15-minute window to get everything out and open, and without Everbridge we would never make that 15 minutes. Just the fact of who it alerts, and how it gets them on calls, is amazing.

The scheduling calendar is also very helpful and very useful. That's what we're looking to roll out. We have other incidents where we need to get people who are on-call to respond back to us and it's a very manual process right now. We call a person and keep trying until we get them. When we get this feature working in phase two, it will reach out to them and if it doesn't reach the first person it will reach out to the next one. The third call will go to the manager to let the manager know that the first ones haven't answered.

It's very customizable. For instance, if you're going on vacation this week, you go to your calendar and say, "I'm off this week, make the secondary the primary." And that's done on-the-fly. It's very responsive. It's very user-friendly. The guys don't have much training in Everbridge but they know how to go into the calendar, move their name out and move the next person up. It's very good.

The calendar is very dynamic. We use ServiceNow which has a calendar-based program, like Everbridge, but the two are night and day. Everything that I've been diving into with Everbridge is actually better than the products we have out-of-the-box. The calendar in Everbridge is much better. Your contact list is already there and that makes it customizable. With ServiceNow, it's very clunky. It's not intuitive and it's nowhere near as dynamic.

What I would like to see is vendor alerting. It's not structured to take into account that users outside of our environment, users outside of IT, may not be in the group. IBM is an outside vendor for us, and we have IBM CEs who come in on a regular basis. If there's a problem, we call those vendors in. That should be tied into the system where we can say that vendors A, B, and C have these users and we want them available to come into the office when there's an issue. We want to be able to alert them in the same way we alert internally. If this contact is not available it would move to the next and the next. It would be great if it could do that.

We have tons of vendors we use from outside of our organization that are not part of the contact list, they're not users in the firm. But if they could be a "vendor contact" and we could scale it the same way we do with individual employees, that would really be the icing on the cake.

It's very stable. We haven't had any problems with the system at all: Getting it in, being able to launch it from mobile devices, from inside the office, outside, websites. Everywhere we go to get into it, it works seamlessly. There has been no downtime so far.

For us, the scalability is great. We're going to go larger later on, but right now it's working for us. On our scale it does 1,000 of us in IT and for that it works perfectly. As we get bigger and push it out more to more users, we'll find out more about the scalability.

We used their consultant, Brandy, in the beginning. Then we started using technical support for lockout issues. What happens a lot of the time is that when you send out an invite to someone to join, they get the invite and wait too long and then the invite expires so they call tech support to get that refreshed. Tech support has been very friendly, very knowledgeable. Aside from lockout issues, we've contacted them for password expiration, for users wanting the Evergreen app for mobile. Some of them can't have it, some can, depending on who they are.

In terms of the lockout, it's fine because you get three attempts to log in and then you get locked out. It changes every 90 days and that's fine for us. That's what we do with corporate, so users are used to it. But that's why we're going to go to single-sign-on, so they don't have to remember that many passwords. When we get there we'll probably alleviate this problem.

Once our people are up to speed with it, they will be able to do it themselves. 

This is our first time using this kind of solution. We were doing it manually before. We were sending out emails and WebEx conferences manually.

In our case, it was taking what we had - because we were using it globally - and making a subset for us for alerting. The Everbridge consultant did it seamlessly. In the first meeting she set up the organization, put us in and gave us admin rights. They did most of the work. The only thing we did was add the contacts. That was manual but not complicated at all.

It took us a week to get the contacts in and the full deployment was done in two weeks easily, including testing and having users going.

The implementation strategy was designed by Everbridge. We thought we could go in and go straight to step one. But there was a lot more design to it. We had to set up the clients first, do the consulting stage, and then worry about how we were going to make a template. We thought it was going to be quick and dirty, but there was actually more of a learning curve for us. We had to set up templates first, learn how to change templates and make templates our own so that, in the future, we wouldn't have to go back and get more training. Instead of turning it around in a week, it took us a month because we wanted to be thoroughly trained in it. Now we do all our own templates, we do our own calls, we do our own updates, we do our own contacts. The month was really good for us. It was slower than we expected, but it really helped us out.

It could have been faster if we wanted things out-of-the-box. It could have been much faster. But we took the initial steps at that time to learn as much as we could so we would be independent. Now we have a much better understanding of what Everbridge does. That time was really important because we also trained our staff. The time was well spent.

Everbridge had an implementation team that worked with our company before our team was in, to set up the national implementation. Then Brandy, from Everbridge, worked with us. We had the day shift which was two supervisors, another two supervisors at night, and two managers. So it was done with a total of six on our side. Those six people are the ones who maintain it.

We worked with one of the Everbridge consultants and she was very helpful. 

Our ROI is in the response time. We have a 15-minute SLA that we were never meeting. We were physically not capable of meeting it in a manual environment. We thought it was unheard of to hit that 15 minutes. Everbridge makes it possible. From where we stood, we thought we'd never get to a half-hour SLA. Today it's 15 minutes.

As far as I'm aware, there are no costs beyond the standard licensing fees.

There were other options we were looking into besides this. We thought another one we looked into was going to do it, but its alerting system didn't do it. Our new manager came in and had his own options but he never showed us what they were because we were so far ahead with Everbridge.

The main deciding factor for going with Everbridge was the integration we're planning to do with ServiceNow. We knew that we wanted it to work with ServiceNow. From a ticketing standpoint, we have tickets that can now be created in ServiceNow that work with Everbridge. So if something happens it will assign an incident number to Everbridge, and we won't have to do that manually. We were also looking at replacing WhatsUp Gold. The new processes coming into place that should work well with Everbridge also.

The competitors had the same features but I think Everbridge works better because that's what they do. Everbridge is an alerting package so it's more robust.

Take your time and look into the total package. There's so much involved in Everbridge. You think it's just alerting but the scheduling package is really phenomenal and the way it integrates. So take your time and look at it thoroughly and learn the bells and whistles before making a decision to know what the whole package is capable of doing. They also have a bridge process where they set up the bridge for you, where you don't have to use something like WebEx. They can do it internally. We didn't know that at the beginning. Look at the package of all the things they do.

We're going to integrate it with ServiceNow. That's going to be important. We haven't used single-sign-on with it, but that's something we'll be looking for later and I don't know how good it is. I would like that to work seamlessly. We don't have single-sign-on right now. Each person logs on with their AD account individually when they go into Everbridge. Single-sign-on is available but we weren't focused on that at first. We were focused on getting the alerting system working. Now that we have that working, we're going to go into the next phase of alerting with the calendar and single-sign-on. It will make it easier for people using it to be able to sign on once.

We have 450 users on the IT side. Globally, there are 15,000 but we're only in charge of the IT side. There are 1,000 people in IT, but right now 450 are in Everbridge.

I would rate Everbridge at ten out of ten.

The primary use case is for us to mobilize and engage our IT workforce in response to either major incidents or critical monitoring alerts that require immediate response. We run anywhere between 150 to 180 major incidents per month. We also use this for our critical ticket management, as well, which is roughly 200 more a month.

Before Everbridge, it would take us anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour and a half to mobilize our IT resource teams.  This was a manual call tree process where you are picking up the phone and calling everybody one by one. Now, by leveraging Everbridge, with a few clicks of a mouse, we are able to go in and request as many teams as we require to respond to an incident and bring them together to collaborate much faster. That 45 minutes to 90 minutes is now a few minutes up to maybe 15 minutes, depending on responsiveness or if the escalations have to kick in. We have seen substantial savings in manpower and a significant reduction in our time to respond and recover.

The automated escalations are the most valuable feature. We program in our escalation chains for each individual IT group. Being able to go out and request a resource from that team, and if they don't respond, that automated escalation makes it very hands off. So, our major incident managers and our network operations center can focus more on the other work that they need to do rather than chasing down those resources. They can rest assured that somebody will be answering.

Another valuable feature is the ease of integration into our ServiceNow platform, where we are doing all of our work between two teams. They are able to make requests from within the tickets that we can manage rather than having to use another portal or logging into Everbridge directly.

Reliability is their biggest value.

The IT Alerting portion of the Everbridge platform is built on all the fundamentals set by their mass notification product. Some of the specific use cases for IT response could use a little attention, in terms of changing the default behavior of the application. That would be the number one for me, which I know that they're already looking to address.

The stability is excellent. In the three years that we've been using it, there has only been one major outage. Even during that outage, there was still limited functionality available. We have definitely seen that since that event, which was a little over a year ago now, they've made some massive improvements to their infrastructure and their highly available environment. There really hasn't been any disruptions since then.

They actually advertised that they improved it. They sent communications to their customer base. They advised them that this was an event that you never really plan for, but it did happen. They made significant investments to ensure that it wouldn't happen again. There has been a series of maintenance to their back-end systems and infrastructure to ensure that they remain more resilient. Since then, we haven't seen a major disruption in service. I would classify it as a very highly available system with minimal disruptions.

They just upgrade their platform continuously, so you're always on the most recent version.

We have a part-time administrator who is doing our day-to-day maintenance. Most of that is more about further enhancements and improvements than about maintenance. Maintenance is very low-key, in terms of an administrator. In IT Alerting, the most complex part is that we have in and around 52 calendars that are being managed for all of our individual IT teams, but we allow the managers of those groups to do the management of those calendars. It's fairly hands-off. There was some work upfront to create some documentation, and we had to train them. That is more of the administration that we have to do now: the upkeep. However, this is more done on a part-time basis.

In IT Alerting, we have around 400 users. In our Everbridge instance, we have everybody in the organization, which is close to 11,000.

When we initially started using the product, we were at around 4,500 users. We were able to more than double that with ease. I know other much larger organizations who are using the platform without issues. In the most recent user group that I attended, they were showing us a lot of improvements on their back-end and database queries, so they could continue to scale. They can pretty much handle any scale that has been presented to them, so far.

The technical support is excellent. They certainly have different layers of support based on what you need and what you require. We have dealt with all levels of support throughout our journey with them. Where some of it is just a simple call into their help desk, which is more about basic troubleshooting, basic issues, maybe some how-tos, or some functions that weren't working exactly. This is right through to very hands-on technical assistance to solve some of our more challenging use cases. Where the IT Alerting platform sometimes isn't designed for the specific use case, they have been able to assign us a technical resource to give us a workaround or maybe to champion an improvement in a future release that will give us that function. We have pretty much seen that ongoing throughout our relationship with Everbridge, where they are always looking to make those enhancements or improvements for the usability of all their customers.

Typical upgrade cycle: We make a recommendation for an enhancement or an improvement, because it's not there. It gets entered on the community, where other customers can vote on it, which will push it up the scale. Or, we also have our account reps who will speak on our behalf to their development teams if there's something that we really need. Then, if there is a sense of urgency, that is where those workarounds come in, where they'll work the system to give us a configuration or rules which will give us what we require.

We have used PagerDuty, xMatters, and one that's not quite IT alerting (Send Word Now). These are all products that we have experience with at Finastra.

The initial setup was very complex. We did not have a very good experience with our initial deployment. Most of this was due to customizations in our ServiceNow instance. When we were using Everbridge as a standalone tool, that implementation was relatively straightforward to get some immediate value. When we went to integrate with our ServiceNow instance, we ran into a lot of challenges. 

We didn't have to, but we made the decision to re-integrate at the end of this past year. That reintegration was very easy and seamless. There was a lot of upgraded functions put into the connector by Everbridge, which have been installed in ServiceNow.

The first time around, it took us a couple of months, a lot of headaches, and a lot of effort. Our second implementation was a matter of hours before we were up and running again. It was a massive improvement from our initial implementation. Half of the improvement was the connectivity capabilities and upgraded connector that Everbridge designed and had certified in the ServiceNow Store. The other half of it was the realization that a lot of our challenges the first time around were based on customizations that we had in our environment. What we did ahead of this implementation was return to the out-of-the-box configuration in our ServiceNow instance. This allowed all of that automated connectivity to just take over, so we didn't have to customize or script. It really was just plug and play. Remove the old connector and install the new one, then do a bit of configuration settings and we were good to go.

The first time, we used a third-party to do all the development. That posed a lot of challenges. It wasn't a great experience. It wasn't just because of the challenging environment. We definitely had some challenges in dealing with that third-party organization and the deployment overall.

Initially, the third-party integrator provided us two full-time resources for six weeks since they were doing a lot of scripting, customizations, and development work.

The second time around, based on the simplicity, we were able to secure a resource from Everbridge for about 45 minutes to meet up with our ServiceNow administration team. They were able to do it all on the call in that short period of time.

On the redeployment, since it took hours, we had maybe one person for two days. That would be at most what we probably committed.

The end result is that we have driven down our MTTR by an average of about 45 minutes across all major outages. That is very substantial considering the cost of every minute of outage can be thousands of dollars lost.

We are saving probably 100 plus hours of outage time within our customer-facing products per month, which is significant. You can easily put that into an ROI of hundreds of thousands per year.

For other use cases, there is at least another 50,000 to 100,000 dollars a year of savings or cost avoidance.

The annual cost is approximately $125,000 USD but is highly dependent on the number of licenses required.

They are one of the cheapest solutions on the market. We looked at all of the major competitors in the space. Everbridge was one of the most affordable for what they are offering.

We switched mostly because of our internal use cases. Everbridge was the most flexible, in terms of adding on additional use cases for just the base function.  Affordability was a big factor as well. When costing out the solution, they were the cheapest for the IT Alerting portion specifically. However, the biggest thing was the ability to add in those additional use cases.

For example, one of our customer support organizations was paying a third-party service to answer phone calls after hours. All they were doing was answering the call and taking some details, then they were engaging a support team who was probably sleeping at that time. Knowing what the capabilities were within IT Alerting, we said, "We could probably give you a better solution for that. We'll give you an email address that your customer can email directly. Then, you'll just maintain your calendar of support in Everbridge. Then, when your customer emails into that address, Everbridge will call you and tell you that you have an email from your customer that you need to respond to." They were able to eliminate that third-party calling service, which was fairly expensive. There was no additional cost because we were able to capture it within the licenses that we already purchase with the product.

We have about a half a dozen other use cases like that which we've been able to leverage the same platform and same licensing for with Everbridge and realize some savings, giving us better service to our internal and external customers.

It is about ensuring that you have the organizational buy-in from the top down. This product starts with the C-level suite when you're going to implement. We struggled through having to prove that the product was worthwhile before we were able to fully implement across the organization. We found some early adopters within those IT responder teams and showed them that this is a product which would help them as well as help our organization. 

We started out with three or four teams three years ago. Now, it is a standard. The organization realizes that there is value here, and that we are going to continue to use it. We have expanded it to more than 50 IT responder teams across the organization. Now, whenever we find a team who isn't using it, we onboard them pretty quickly, as it is part of the standard.

The product is pretty new for them. We were a pretty early adopter to the product. I don't know where we stand in terms of 10th or 50th (or whatever), but I know that the product itself is only about four years old, from what I understand.

We have already been able to drive a massive amount of value out of it in its current state. Anything else is what I would call finessing, or refinement. Some of that may be specific to my organization and how we use it. We already have a roadmap of how we will to continue to use it, which will be leveraging a lot more automation, but most of that is already ready on the Everbridge side. It's more our ServiceNow instance that we need to prepare for that level of automation.

All of the core function that we are looking for is already there in Everbridge. They have the connectivity into our ServiceNow instance, which is pivotal, so that we can affect workflows to automate our engagements. Today, it's our network operations center and major incident management team who are requesting resources. The intention is to have our ServiceNow instance automatically do that based on defined workflows, so we are taking the human element or delay out of it. Everbridge is already set to allow us to do this.

I would give the product a solid nine because of their support. It is how responsive that they have been between their account management, technical resources, and leadership. They knew that we had a very painful implementation the first time. Therefore, for our second implementation, they were very hands-on. We had a lot of conversations leading up to the implementation about the support that we needed and what our goals were. They were very responsive in providing us pretty much whatever we needed, just short of Professional Services and doing it for us. They were very clear that they could do all of this for us but there would be a fee. However, they are always there to help, which is the biggest thing for me. You almost consider them to be more like a partner than a vendor. If you treat them more like a partner, and they treat you as such as well, then you are likely to have a much more desirable outcome.

We have a ticketing system, Remedy OnDemand, a fairly large IT shop, several thousand servers, about 900 people or so working in IT, about one-third of them are doing support in one way or another or having to deal with incidents. So the use case for this tool was to notify teams or individuals that there was an incident in progress that they needed to attend to. Usually, it was for incidents that had the kind of priority that needed immediate attention.

Natively, Remedy will send out an email. But if you need to get somebody's attention because a server is on the brink of falling over, that doesn't cut it.

Our use case was essentially incident notification.

I was there to transition to the tool. I did all the use cases for it and then I handed off the reins of power to my successor.

For us, having a quick response to urgent events - events that were not necessarily critical but that could become critical if not dealt with urgently - was important for us.

Prior to having a notification system in place, we either had to have an operations person checking all the queues in Remedy or someone subscribing to emails from Remedy and then doing manual call-outs to people at 3 am because a server died.

We had a fairly sophisticated ticket flow. We had a monitoring system with an events co-relation and event management system that would then automatically create incident tickets. The incidents tickets, based on their level of urgency, would then be channeled out through the Everbridge IT alerting platform which would then trigger off escalations based on the urgency of the incident. For example, if there was a P1 incident where the data center was down, it would escalate much more quickly than if there was a P3 issue that you needed to look at quickly to avoid a P1.

If we were to compare no IT alerting to IT alerting of any kind, the latter makes a significant difference. In our case, we used to have real, live operators who would call people out. Now, the operations staff is there just to manage some escalations but it really removes the human from the equation, from the moment of detection to notification. 

Before, we'd have a human looking at a console of some kind and that person would then have to look up a contact list to find out who was the owner of the alert, find their number, call them and, if nothing happened, figure it out, and say, "Okay, I've got to escalate." They would then have to call the second person in line, and so on. It was not really a manageable situation. Having an alerting solution connected to our ticketing system made the flow much more effective and really did improve our overall response time and uptime.

There are quite a few valuable features. In terms of the general notifications, one of the things that was interesting and good is that you can configure the tool to escalate if no action is taken within a certain time period. That avoids sending off an alert that nobody deals with and where nobody knows that nobody has dealt with it. 

You can program in rotations, shifts, and scenarios of different kinds and it allows you to page multiple people, or people in sequence, or a group of people simultaneously.

Another good feature Everbridge has is deduplication. We had cases where everybody on a team had the same phone number. Maybe they were passing a cell phone around. When the tool sees that, it doesn't call the same phone number 15 times. It will call it one time, because it will see, as part of the list of devices and device hours, that it's a duplicate.

Once your users are defined, you can pop up a map and draw a circle on the map and notify everybody within that area. That geo feature is really useful if you have a particular incident where there is a protest on the street, a building on fire, a Hazmat spill. These are all scenarios that I've lived through.
It was crucial at that time to have a solution where one could say, "Let me draw a radius around the impacted building and have everybody in that radius contacted." That was a huge win.

The feature that xMatters has that Everbridge doesn't have, or has in a limited way, is a method of funneling some alerts, as an FYI, to other stakeholders who are not necessarily prime actors in an incident. For example, you have a support team that supports critical application X, and you have somebody who is actually the application owner. The application owner normally does not normally get called out in the middle of the night to let him know that his application is down, unless it's super-critical and it's going to stay down. But they would be receiving a copy of the notification that was sent out so they'd know that something happened overnight, or that something is happening right now.

It's been performing like a champ. We haven't had any outages. I had lunch with my buddies last week, and there has been nothing significantly wrong. It's been flowing like it should. 

The old 2012 solution was using somewhat dated technology and it was starting to choke on a regular basis. We really didn't want that with the volume of incidence tickets that we were generating.

We didn't have any scalability issues with it. I don't have a comparison point, but it easily handled everything we threw at it.

Everbridge's tech support was really excellent. They were on the ball, they had answers to our questions. They made things happen that they probably hadn't done beforehand. I found them really collaborative and very much a pleasure to work with.

I found Everbridge to be very responsive during the implementation phase, and post-implementation, whenever we had questions, we were able to reach out either via our managed service provider or directly to Everbridge. As a longtime tech guy - I've got over 30 years in the business - they were really a blast to work with. It's always great to work with people who are competent and who have some kind of empathy for your reality.

I'm not sure if I was dealing with US people, Toronto people, or overseas people. There were a lot of people from different places coming onto phone bridges. At a certain point it was hard to tell who was a managed service provider, who was Remedy, who was Everbridge. It was just quite the multinational effort.

It could have been a real horror story, and it turned out very well. We were starting to have doubts at one point, and then they called in the cavalry. We had a few extra resources. And things went off pretty much without a hitch.

Before, we were using xMatters, which is another notification tool, a very old version that was resold to us through a managed service provider. Our xMatters solution was hosted by them and it was at end-of-life. It was the last xMatters on-prem offering back in 2012 or 2013.

When we migrated we looked at different solutions but the Everbridge solution was the most cost-effective at the time. It didn't have, from my perspective, any other clear advantages over xMatters, over PagerDuty.

In our environment it made financial sense and, with the templates, it made operational sense. It worked just fine. It was surprisingly, blazingly fast. The throughput was pretty incredible. The time from when the incident system - the ticketing system - poked Everbridge to say that there was something going on, until Everbridge starting to notify, was very short.

I wasn't even aware that Everbridge was doing an IT alerting product up until last year. I had always known them to be a mass-notification type of company. It was actually a smart move on their part to leverage their mass-notification capability - which, by definition, means you're alerting a whole ton of people in a very short period of time - into an IT alerting product.

In the past, that's where we would run into issues with our on-prem xMatters installation. Sometimes, when there were too many alerts, a lot of queuing would happen. I didn't see any instances while I was there - and we did tests with a lot of events - of much queuing happening on the Everbridge side.

I don't really consider Everbridge to be a relatively new product. Everbridge had an alerting product beforehand. All they did was enhance their alerting product and add functionality required for it to become an IT alerting product. But they started off with a really good base. They managed the transition to an IT-alerting product fairly gracefully.

The setup was straightforward once you understood that it is a different paradigm. When you're used to things being a certain way - if you're used to Windows and you switch to Mac you have a little bit of an adjustment period and then things become intuitive. It was the same here. There's nothing inherently overly-complex about the tool itself. But if you're coming from another tool with a different underlying paradigm, you do have to wrap your head around some different concepts. It took a while to catch on to how to properly use the tool and to convey to Everbridge what exactly we were expecting as a result.

The deployment took about two months.

There were a lot of steps in there including a massive cleanup of the old notification system, so we wouldn't transport garbage into the future, a migration of over 1,000 users, which is quite a bit, all the technical onboarding that had to happen for people, so that they'd know how to use the new tool, exposure to the new functionalities. The training was done simultaneously with the integration of the tool. We had a Dev, a QA, and a Prod environment. We ran it through its paces in all three to make sure it worked out. 

The project took longer because the biggest problem was deciding on the tool. But once the tool was decided on, it was about a two-month effort to convert.

 The actual technical implementation strategy was really just making sure we were passing the right variables and tweaking templates until they were just so.

We used our managed service provider, and we had people from Everbridge and Remedy directly involved. But we did not have any third-party consultants.

Considering the knowledge of the people who were involved in the implementation from the Everbridge side, the transparency with which they worked with us, and the rapidity of the responses and corrections or modifications or tweaks, it was really a very pleasant experience.

It replaced something that was already doing a very similar job, so the ROI is hard to quantify. We already had something that notified people. Compared to having nothing, the ROI would have been substantial.

But let's look at it this way: If you have 1,000 users and you're paying $25 a head, you're paying $25,000 per month. If you have access to metrics on incident management and how much it costs a large organization to deal with a major incident, having a notification tool in place reduced our number of major incidents by about 20 percent, year over year.

It's helpful when you can notify and have solid proof of notification. Then you have accountability. What was particularly interesting was that the gains were seen because people were then able to be notified of things that were urgent but not a P1 yet, still at a pre-impact level. The classic example would be a disk that is filling up. You've got a critical app and if the disk fills up, you're toast. Monitoring picks it up, creates a ticket, dispatches it off to a team, the team gets notified. If nobody responds within 10 or 15 minutes, it gets escalated. So for sure, within half an hour, somebody would look at it. Just doing that greatly reduced the number of disk-space incidents we had.

In terms of additional costs, I was just the guy who was the pain in the back, telling them, "No, we need this functionality. You forgot this. These are the use cases that need to be represented." But apart from the integration costs and, obviously, using resources from Remedy and using resources from Everbridge, regarding licensing costs we just had that flat fee. Once we integrated it was just a standardized fee.

Our need was very unsophisticated in the sense that we wanted to notify a predefined set of people based on predefined criteria. Within Everbridge you could accomplish that using something called templates. It had an automated flow-through.

What xMatters has that Everbr201ge e doesn't have is something interesting called a subscription, where you can get an FYI notification of an event or incident based on matching keywords or other elements of the message.

We did a quick market scan and we saw PagerDuty out there, xMatters was out there. I don't remember if there Opsgenie was available at the time. But there were a bunch of them that all seemed to coalesce around the same price point and, for whatever reason, Everbridge came in as less expensive and they did integrations with Remedy OnDemand.

That was good for us because in a large shop with a good flow of incident tickets, for the people who are resolving these things it becomes cumbersome to take notifications, log in, go into the ticketing system and assign the ticket to themselves, and then work on the problem. With the Everbridge integration the person who acts on the alert becomes the owner of the ticket and the ticket changes status. That facilitated the visibility of how the incidents were being handled at the bank.

We also needed device discrimination based on severity of ticket, time discrimination based on the severity of ticket, and impact of ticket. You're not going to page out somebody for a low-level event.

My chief advice would be to know your use cases. A tool like Everbridge can do just about anything. All of these tools are very powerful tools. Start small, pick something that is attainable and that you can measure, and then build from there. Sometimes people try too hard to do everything at the same time, to implement every possible functionality on day one. It never works. 

Also, if you have a poorly defined use case you have a problem. The tool itself is good but, while Microsoft Word is a decent tool, it doesn't make me a writer. That's how I see Everbridge. It's a decent tool, but it doesn't mean that it makes you an alerting god if you don't know how you want to use it and how you plan to use it or what your expected results are. 

You really have to think through the process, the whole process. We're lucky that our incident management processes were defined. People knew what to expect. I had some very specific use cases. I needed shifts, I needed rotations, I needed device discrimination, depending on the type of alert. I needed targeted escalations. I needed escalations to our NOC for certain types of events. All of these things had to be figured out beforehand. If you discover them as you go along, it impacts the design. If you're designing for a fuzzy need you're going to have a bad time when it comes down to implementation.

In terms of improvement in remediation time, we had already seen that. Our use case was the same use case we had before. 

It was the primary means of notification for our ticketing system. In terms of incidents coming from automation, from monitoring, in any given month there would be 6,000 to 10,000 tickets, depending on the month and what happened.

Something to know about these systems is that once they're configured, they're pretty much set-and-forget. After that, it's just add a user, remove a user. It's very rare in our specific use case that we'd have to change a template.

In terms of IT alerting, I'd give Everbridge a solid eight out of ten. I'd give it a nine if the subscription functionality was a bit better. It's lightweight from an end-user perspective. It's not overly busy. It's straightforward in the way it communicates and it's heavily customizable.