Everbridge IT Alerting Reviews

It is for our Global Security Operations Center (GSOC). We use it for its functionalities. It is a part of our alerting systems. Because it's a global company, we have a GSOC and some of the functionalities that we use it for are tracking security threats, monitoring, and notifying our staff and contractors. We also use it for emergency response usage.

The product started off on-premise, then was migrated to a Software as a Service (SaaS) infrastructure.

We are in the process of automating a lot of our processes. Because it has a SaaS version, the APIs are easily integratable, and we are able to consolidate functions and vendors. This saves money, because of the downturn in the industry, as everybody is penny-pinching these days. We are able to find ways to cut back. This product is very helpful with that since it is a good tool for consolidating functions for security purposes and all of the security functions that the GSOC needs.

• It is easy to integrate. APIs connect to it. Because it is easily integratable with other software that we use, even homegrown, it does save money.
• With SaaS, we can implement in other regions without having to physically go to there.
• We monitor all our security threats globally on our big video wall, which is great visually. 
• The response time is real-time alerting. It is very helpful, because it makes things a lot easier. All we have to do is put a circle around a geo-fence and shoot off a message. For vessel support, they can be notified if there is inclement weather close by.
• We are able to do incident messaging for emergency notifications. We are able to monitor our security alerts. We are able to link all of these functions together. 

I would like them to add GPS going forward. I think they may be working on this, but it is not implemented yet. We want to be able track our shipments, people, and every asset in real-time. With global positioning, especially in oil and gas, we might have a fleet in a pirated area (with active shooters) and have to move fast in situations. We need to know where our people are, how to locate all our assets, and secure them, regardless if they're people, places, vessels, or structures.

The company would also like to have super detailed analytics, as we integrate this with our security software, e.g., camera systems. We want to see ant walking on the ground type of detail. That is the pinpoint analysis that we are looking for in this solution.

The stability is good. Right now, it is a great product. We are just trying to enhance and automate it as much as we can. 

Scalability is pretty good. We haven't had any issues.

Our GSOC is using it right now, which is give or take 20 people. However, it rotates and shifts personnel, so they are not using it all at once.

It probably took a few months to deploy because we go through tests and configurations before going live. We have to test it out in different environments.

This product has helped us save $200,000 from being able to get rid of vendors and consolidate functionalities to doing incident reporting. 

We use it to consolidate and remove a lot of manual processes from the enterprise notification space.

What it allows us to do is integrate with our CMDB. Within our CMDB, we have everything including the ownership, from the executive level down to operational. It enables us to quickly and easily identify who the target audience is through the subscription model that is embedded in Everbridge. It helps with targeted communication and accuracy and timeliness. On average, it saves us roughly five to seven minutes, when we compare all of the manual processes we used to have versus using the tool as integrated into our ticketing system. We send about 15 to 20 of these broadcast messages per day, on average. So the time savings are definitely substantial.

The most important feature, from our perspective, is the integration with our ticketing system. That eliminates wasted motion and time in drafting and sending and finding the right distribution list. It's all integrated with the ticketing system, so from the ticket itself, we manage all of the notifications that we send. We're able to manage an incident within the confines of the ticketing system at something like 70 to 80 percent accuracy. The integration feature with the ticketing system is of extreme value.

Everything could always be a little bit easier, a little bit faster, but I'm not sure that I can really name anything else off the top of my head.

We haven't had any downtime-type problems. At some time within this calendar year, there was a temporary outage for a few minutes of some function within the system, and I'm not even sure it was one that I leverage. I get notifications from them through their communication systems telling me what the statuses are of the various components of the system, and I don't recall any point where the system was unavailable in its entirety. The stability has been excellent.

Scalability seems to be very robust. When I look at not just what we're doing with it but what it can do, if we were to put the proper amount of effort behind some of the integrations, the scalability is good.

I'm looking at changing a number of things in 2019 and there will be opportunities for more integrations so that we take better advantage of the platform. From a scalability standpoint, that headroom is there. It is just up to us to identify those opportunities and take advantage of them.

Everbridge's tech support is amazing. I've been in IT for the last 20 years and I've had a lot of interaction with a lot of vendors for a lot of reasons. The Everbridge team is head-and-shoulders above virtually all of them. Their technical account manager is nothing short of amazing. They spend the time to build the relationships, which I really like. They visit every so often, we have quarterly meetings, we have weekly meetings. They're very responsive. They're really fantastic in that way.

That can be the most valuable aspect of choosing a vendor. The fact of the matter is that you can use a lot of different systems. There is always competition out there. Some do some things better than others and there are little nuances to all the systems. But at the end the day, personally, I'm not a transactional person. I like to build those relationships and build on them and I think that shows in the platform.

We had a conglomeration of a number of tools that were similar in that space but they were not being used anywhere near the way we're using Everbridge now. They were mostly for disaster-recovery types of functions. But we did not use them anywhere near to the same extent as we are now using IT Alerting. We eliminated all of those tools, as far as I know. Some of them were homegrown escalation and on-call type tools. Some were third-party competitors to Everbridge, and we eliminated all of those and consolidated on this platform.

The need for an improvement over what we had was self-evident for an operations person: What was efficient and what wasn't. We could see, fairly easily, what was taking more time than it should. If you're technologically savvy and you know what an automation opportunity looks like, it presents itself.

The initial setup was more complex than I anticipated. Initially, we were using their UI to send our notifications. It wasn't quite integrated with the ticketing system yet, not at phase one. Phase two was the integration with the ticketing system. All of the required data integrations and the normalizing of the data and customizing it for our needs and purposes took more time than I anticipated. Perhaps that was just me, but I was anticipating that it would be a little bit less difficult than it turned out to be.

From phase one where we were using their UI, until we had phase two, which was the initial deployment with the ticketing system, it took about three to four months.

Our implementation strategy was to take a phased approach to get us to our end goal with the integration and our notifications. We had specific business goals: the original deployment, the creation of the templates, and the basic operating model of the system, through to the integration and, now, to the improvements that are in the future-state of the platform. Next is leveraging some of the features within the system that are more intelligent. For example, when you send a notification you could have it posted to the application. There are a whole bunch of more advanced functions that we're still working towards.

One of the other problems we had, which we did not anticipate, was: If we send out a notification to everybody in the enterprise, that's a significant number and, technically, those messages source from "not your domain." There had to be some fine-tuning to make that work in light of things like the spam, IronPorts, etc. on the front-end servers, the mail servers. It took a little bit of work to get that the way we needed it to be.

Including the developers on the ticketing-system side, the deployment took six to eight people on our side. They made the majority of the decisions and handled the testing and implementation. The phase we're in now is more of a business-as-usual release cycle and enhancement type phase. It doesn't require the density of attention that it did.

We used the Everbridge TAM for most of it and then our own ticketing-system people and our own resources.

We definitely have seen ROI. When we have an incident or an outage, we can focus on what we need to do, which is fix the problem, instead of finding forms and sending emails and cobbling together inefficient manual processes. The ROI is clearly there.

We looked at xMatters and at Send Word Now. We also did an internal proof of concept to spec out what it would cost to develop our own system and run it, but for the cost we were looking at to develop it and implement it and run it on a daily basis, it was more cost-effective to use a third party.

This was something that I had actually been working on for a number of years before we adopted Everbridge. I had any number of sessions with some of my operations partners in the company where we would sit down and do a bake-off among those competing tools. As I said, there are nuances to everything, but at the end of the day, we decided we like the Everbridge user interface better. There were some other smaller decision points. Some of it was around cost, but ultimately it was the user interface. And certainly, some of it was due to the people at Everbridge. They were excellent.

My advice would be: Do your homework. It's a matter of looking at your specific needs. To me, it's like buying a car, it's the fundamentals of the system. Does it do what you need it to do, what's important to you? And look at what the future capabilities of the system are. That's part of it as well.

My team, IT, uses the system on a day-to-day basis and the others who use it are the developers on the ticketing-system side. Our team is using it for IT support and I have about 50 or 60 individuals who are working in the system and using the integration, 24/7 and 365. But there are other slices of our organization, which are not IT, that are using it for communication. There's Customer Operations and Field Operations and others that are also using it for similar purposes but different use cases.

In terms of usage, it's integral. We use it many times every day, all day. The various organizations within the company are using it every day for communication and coordination. There are other integration possibilities in some of the existing features that we're not taking advantage of. And in the future state of the platform, there are some interesting possibilities that I see with integration with our monitoring tools and some of our other services and applications.

Everything really seems to integrate pretty well. The support from Everbridge is really excellent. When we want changes or we need improvements, we get those fairly quickly and they're very communicative with regard to the product's platform itself and the enhancements. They seem to be looking very intently at the future to see the space grow and what it's going to evolve into. They're doing a pretty good job with that.

They have helped us with some of the moving parts of the integration with the ticketing system. There are enhancements we wanted with the mobile app, any number of changes with integrations and APIs. We've actually had a lot of improvements to it, even in the last year since we deployed it.

I would rate it a good, solid eight out ten. I'm not going to give anything a ten ever. There is some room to improve the initial-rollout functions which are a little bit painful.

We use it for technical engagement and stakeholder communication during major IT outages.

It has made the technical engagement process more efficient, going from approximately five minutes to generate a page down to 30 seconds.

The most valuable feature is automated escalation, as it eliminates a manual process which is prone to errors.

The integration with other solutions needs improvement. I am not at liberty to share the name of the application/vendor we are trying to integrate with, but I can tell you that it is our incident management tool. Due to issues with the libraries provided by Everbridge, we have not been able to integrate IT Alerting with that tool.

Everbridge has been able to deliver in accordance with their SLAs.

Scaling can be a tedious endeavor if users and contacts are manually created.

The technical support is excellent. They routinely answer problems on the first call.

I’m not at liberty to name it but, the previous solution required us to manually look up and engage. This was time-consuming and prone to errors. Those are the reasons we switched.

The initial setup was straightforward as we had a consultant with us. The consultant was helpful. There was a lot of prep work that we could and should have completed prior to the consultant arriving onsite. Had we known to do this, it would have made the engagement more productive.

The deployment took approximately two weeks. Our goal was to configure the teams we engage most often. Those 30 teams represent 95 percent of our volume.

A consultant was used, and the experience was very positive.

The current pricing model is adequate. We feel that the pricing model for our IT Alerting solution is competitive with similar solutions on the market.

We did evaluate other options but I'm not at liberty to comment on them.

My advice is to leverage any of the integrations you can. In addition, do the prep work, including creating contacts, users, and groups, prior to the consultative work provided by Everbridge.

We have over 500 users, a majority of whom are group managers along with some organizational and account admins. We have two FTEs supporting Everbridge and their roles range from configuration management, to vision and strategy, and vendor relations. The product is used extensively, with roughly 25,000 messages sent through the tool annually.

Our use case is using it to reduce the time to assemble everyone, especially when reacting to major incidents, and to reduce the time spent doing manual call-outs and engagements in the course of them.

The background, and why we looked into getting a tool in the first place, is that when we were engaged on an incident and it rose in severity or the scope of impact broadened, there were many different checkboxes that we could check: "Okay, now we need to re-engage this person, this person, and this person." Also, just in the average incident-information process, we needed additional speed in getting people engaged, rather than manually looking up the on-call information to see who's engaged or on-call. We would have to manually call them and possibly get voicemail and have to try the second number.

We use it for every bridge call that we host and every engagement of an on-call group that we need. We use it multiple times a day, every day.

Our performance showed us that, for major incidents, we spent over 40 minutes just making manual call-outs. That is why we implement the tool in the first place and that time has been cut down to two or three minutes. We've had tremendous gains on that.

It's a lot easier to create and manage schedules, especially in comparison to the on-call scheduling creation in ServiceNow. That has always been something of a bear to operate. We've found it's a lot simpler in Everbridge.

It enables everybody on our team to focus on their primary responsibilities, driving toward restoration, instead of being distracted by manually calling folks.

Creating the templates and being able to create my own variables are helpful features.

Their latest features are going to allow me to be a bit more flexible with using Everbridge for internal communications. We started using it for internal incident notifications a few months ago, and having that group lookup, allowing me to create a relation between a property and a variable in the template, and who should be contacted as far as a group in the organization goes, is going to allow for some nice self-service for our internal folks when we transition to a different Everbridge organization for our internal coms.

With their templates, you can only have a maximum of three phases: new, updated, and resolved. It's not always that easy when we open up a call, that we identify who we need, page out, and we're good. A lot of time it requires multiple page-outs. Being restricted to those three phases, there's no way to say, "I want this variable to be persistent, and this one to not be." Everything that you select will be brought over as you continue. In our environment, as we have many different call-outs that have to happen, even though they are incredibly simple to select and execute now in Everbridge, it is quite the long list. I would like to make it a bit easier and more intuitive. I would like to see a bit more flexibility and tighter control over the templates and the variables you can create.

Also, they still have a limitation due to their partner, I believe it's Twilio, where, if you're on an incident call, there is a four-hour time limit. We often have calls that go over four hours in length so people have to drop and rejoin to reset their four-hour timer. It's a minor inconvenience, but it's not ideal. That is pretty persistent with any IT alerting partner you go with.

We've been using it for a year. There have been a couple of instances of our encountering some weird issues with the calls being dropped, or people not being able to hear. That was more towards the beginning part of our go-live. We ended up identifying it through troubleshooting with Everbridge and Twilio and different networks. It was an issue with an AT&T circuit somewhere. They were kind enough to give us a different set of bridge numbers so that we were going on a different path. Since going to those numbers, we haven't encountered that same sort of instability or call-quality issues. 

Other than that, occasionally a service advisory will go out from Everbridge where a certain communication path is having issues. But those are typically quickly resolved. We are pretty comfortable with the stability.

We've had no problems with scalability. We brought in Everbridge shortly after we had bought another company and started merging together into a new, unified company. That, obviously, brings some substantial scaling challenges. But we've encountered no issues with adding many, many more users to the system over the last several months.

We only have a couple of hundred people directly interfacing with Everbridge, maybe a few hundred. But as far as the users we're communicating to, it's a few thousand and that keeps increasing as we progress.

Everybody I've dealt with at Everbridge tech support, barring one individual on their staff, has been pretty nice to work with. They're knowledgeable, they're helpful, they want to assist. There have been a couple of times that it's been challenging to get the escalation that we were looking for. We were hoping to get some more urgency, especially when we were first going live, with the instability issues we were seeing. It took a little longer to get that escalation that we were looking for, but once it happened, we certainly got the amount of attention that we needed on the issue. For the most part, after that experience, it's been pretty good.

We were not using a different solution previously for IT alerting. The on-call schedules were managed and stored in ServiceNow. As I said, the reason behind getting IT Alerting was that everything was manual. We weren't using a competitor like PagerDuty or xMatters.

The initial setup really depends on the environment you are operating in. They can easily integrate and do imports from an HR system and from ServiceNow and from many different applications. They do have a lot of good options that you can easily get things set up with. For internal reasons we couldn't do it, but I definitely saw that the ability was there to do it. I would call it straightforward.

We did the deployment in under a month. It was a pretty aggressive time frame.

We didn't really have an implementation strategy. We were focused on getting the users that we wanted to bring over from ServiceNow identified and on marrying up that data with what was going to be in Everbridge. You can pass that information along through the API connector. We ended up just doing an export and then manually uploading it to Everbridge.

It was a matter of identifying who was in the system that we needed to get in there as a contact. From there, our strategy was to get meetings scheduled with the high-level folks who pass information down through the disparate on-call groups that they're in charge of, so they could let them know what changes were coming.

One big part of the overall strategy was having executive backing, because going from one organizational culture, where folks are used to having a certain amount of time to respond to a bridge call, to Everbridge, where we wanted to have the system escalate, and escalate quickly - since when we engage those folks on a bridge call, it's because we're losing money and our customers are losing money - you have a lot less time to respond to a call before it escalates. Obviously, people who are living on-call schedules are not going to like that kind of news. If you don't have that executive backing, then people aren't going to be as quick to adhere to the new organizational culture of, "you need to be on a call within a few minutes, if we start paging you." There would be no more of this, "I'll be there, when I can, in 15 minutes."

We had our integration consultant from Everbridge on hand. There were no third-parties.

We have definitely seen ROI, not in terms of dollars and cents, but the mean time to restore from major incidents has been more than halved in terms of duration. Being the company we are, in the financial world, and with how many transactions are processed through us in a second, the potential financial savings from even just a minute of reduced outage time can be substantial.

For the one-way license, which refers to someone is just on the receiving end, it's very affordable. I was actually surprised that it was a really good price. The two-way license, like for an on-call resource who is actually going to be in a calendar and be paged, it is a bit more expensive, but for the gains that we've realized, it's certainly worth the price.

We looked at MIR3 - they are called OnSolve now - and we looked at xMatters. MIR3 just didn't check enough boxes. It didn't seem like a good solution for storing and managing and quickly engaging people on bridge calls. xMatters and Everbridge seemed to have a better, more intuitive user interface, more robust options, better reporting options, and more flexibility.

Get that executive leadership backing, and make sure that you're not just going to use Everbridge to page out to people in a different manner. You should look to set that "timer" pretty low on bridge engagement and get people used to responding and getting on bridge calls immediately, because every minute of an outage is lost money.

Determine up front if you are going to do the group integration from whatever application you might be looking to do the user-sync with. If you are going to have an application with on-call schedules maintained, such as Service Now - as I believe there is an option to turn on group sync - be careful about turning that group sync feature on. User sync is pretty straightforward but we were warned against using the group sync feature for various reasons, even from within Everbridge.

Our users are support staff, on-call resources, on-call leaders, incident commanders, communication managers. There are a couple of senior leaders who know how to use it, but it is mainly incident management and communication management.

Our deployment team was just a handful of folks. We needed a little bit of partnership from our ServiceNow folks to get the API into place. You could go with a half-dozen people on the integration. For the maintenance aspect, it's even less than that.

There are four of us who administrate the tool. I'm the communication management piece of it. My manager handles major incident and critical communications, so he's incident management as well, and he does a lot of admin work in it. Our project manager is the incident commander and communication management.

We have support staff who don't have the rights to kick off Everbridge to automatically engage people, but they'll still access the Everbridge Member Portal to manually look up resources and call them for lower-priority issues. We use it pretty heavily right now and we are definitely looking at other ways of utilizing the tool. We expect it to increase pretty substantially, as we go forward.

One of the big things that we're looking to do is integrating it with event monitoring. We're looking to further reduce the mean time to assemble for major incidents by bypassing the current process. Currently, event monitoring takes in a ticket and it gets assigned to a queue in ServiceNow where an agent will see it, and they'll call out the support person. That person will say, "Okay, well we need a bridge call for this." What we are trying to do is identify, with the various application support teams, among the events that are creating tickets, which ones are deemed "critical" that could be a precursor to a major incident. We want to identify those and create incident conditions in ServiceNow that will engage an Everbridge template to get the incident management team engaged right away, rather than waiting on those manual actions to happen. We're still in the early stages of that, and we are looking to increase that sort of usage for Everbridge to gain more efficiencies.

Some of them are live right now. We call them the "Everbridge critical alerts" and we have many that are already in production. We are looking to expand that even more.

I would rate Everbridge IT Alerting at eight out of ten, overall. It's a very powerful tool. We've made a lot of efficiency gains but there are definitely things that, from an enhancement standpoint, we would like to see added to the tool. The progress on that hasn't been as quick as we'd like. Its been pretty slow going.

With what we already have in place, it's enabling us to do a lot. I absolutely love having the tool. I would not rate it as a ten out of ten, but they're definitely heading in the right direction. From what I've seen, as far as what they are planning on having, I would say it could be a ten out of ten this time next year, if things go well in year-two. But for year-one, I would say it's an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of how we started using the product was to add contacts to Everbridge as if it was an Active Directory. We have logins for manager and member portals. The manager portal gives total access and member portal is given to everyone with partial access.

We also use it to send out communications, such as emails, during major incidents from our command center. We have expanded its use as an emergency notification tool.

The rotation and replacement options save our managers a lot of time.

When scheduling, it gives us the option to amend times or replace someone (with an explanation). 

The rules option has been helpful, as we can adjust the conditions in the template.

Explanations are limited to 500 characters in description fields.

While the reporting is good, we are having a problem with one particular report which is creating a large manual process for us.

We don't have stability issues.

We have been able to expand the tool and are planning to take it to the store level.

In our organization, we have 390 management users currently. We are looking to add 250 more. We have requested to have 650 management user licenses in the future.

We currently have 9000 member users. We are looking to add another 3500 member users, so we have requested 12,400 member licenses.

We would like the tech support to have better response times. Since we are looking at going global, they have told us Everbridge has told us that they are working on the issue.

Overall, their responses have been good.

I personally would rate the technical support as a 10 out of 10.

Previously, we were using xMatters, then we moved on to Everbridge because we thought there were some limitations xMatters when we used their templates and there were a lot of delays with sending out notifications. We also did not feel that xMatters product was user-friendly.

Initially, we thought it wasn't complicated. However, we did have some issues with stability and had to reach out to the support team. Later on, it wasn't difficult.

The deployment took about three to four months.

We have four team members on our Everbridge team.

It saves us a lot of time.

It is the best tool that I have ever used.

Incident reporting, mass notification to all offices and employees.

This product has allowed the teams to focus on troubleshooting rather than dealing with the administrative task of having to notify individuals or groups about incidents. This has saved man-hours and has already paid for the product.

• Mass Notification and Conditions - This streamlines the process of notifying the proper people of an event without team members having to look up who they need to notify. 
• Calendar - Having the Calendar built in allows for on-call rotation to be set once and left alone.
• Slack Integration - Being able to have all the information from an incident and discussions documented through Slack, without input, is a great asset.
• Email Ingestion - Having the ability for ticket generation to auto-generate an incident through Everbridge has saved my team hundreds of man-hours it would have taken to manually create them. This aspect has been one of the driving factors in continuing to utilize Everbridge and finding all the new ways the tool will help with day-to-day operations.

An ability to get to the database that houses our information would be great. Currently, we are at the mercy of Everbridge and, if they do not have the function built, we cannot gather the information that we would like.

I have never experienced a stability issue. We once had an issue with the built-in conference bridges. After troubleshooting, we were able to determine the issue was on our internal PBX system and not Everbridge.

So far, no issues with scalability. Anytime we have a request for a function, they work at meeting that request and eventually get it to us.

Technical support is great when working with our direct account representative. Sometimes, when using the email support, there is a communication breakdown and it can take a while to get issues resolved.

Our previous solution was to get on the phone and on email and try to remember who needs to be notified. We switched to this product to assure standardization of notifications and to create groups of people who need notifications.

The initial setup was straightforward. My team and I did a lot of research and prepared what we knew we wanted, upfront. This enabled the onboarding process to go quickly and smoothly.

The number of man-hours saved, and the standardization of notifications in mass form, have paid for product time and again.

We did not evaluate other products, as this product met all our criteria. We have had companies come to us since the implementation of this product, companies which offer the same types of services. None of them has been able to show us theirs is more robust or worth moving to.

Prepare ahead of time with your vision of what you want from it. We were able to start implementing the tool on the very first visit with our account representative, saving time and money.

We use it for the email integration portion.

We've created fake units in the CAD system and, when activated, it sends an email to Everbridge. That has allowed the dispatchers to send out quick notifications. Before, they'd have to log into Everbridge, find the right thing, fill it out - do the full Everbridge thing - which always got deferred to later because they were busy doing other things. By creating the fake unit in CAD to trigger the email integration, all they have to do is assign a unit using the system they're already working in and it will send out the raw information from the call. That's been helpful so that the command staff gets quicker notifications of things.

The initial reason we got it was the lightning protection integration. We had a guy struck by lightning at the airport about a year and a half ago. Our lightning system was going off but this provides an extra layer of protection. With it, all the people who have signed up for that notification automatically get an Everbridge notification on their phone as soon as the thing goes off. They know, "This is active, I should do something about that," instead of relying on the horns and sirens that the lightning system uses. It's hard to quantify. We haven't had anyone struck by lightning since, but we hadn't had anyone struck by lightning before either. It is just an extra way for our tenants to be able to be in the loop on what's happening.

The lightning integration has been really helpful, especially for our maintenance department. It was intended for tenants and stakeholders. But the maintenance department, because they're out in the field all day, their director said all their work phones get it, no matter what. Before, they were running around trying to find people to tell them, "Lightning is on," to make sure they were shutting down. Now, everybody out there in the field who has a phone, and almost all of them do, immediately knows the lightning system is active and that they need to shut down.

The email integration, the ability to launch from other programs using email triggers, was the primary reason we got the solution and it's been really helpful. We've been able to integrate our CAD system into it using it. The CAD system is kind of old and it doesn't like to talk to things so the integration is useful.

We also have a lightning protection system and were able to integrate it using email. The lightning was our main purpose for upgrading to IT Alerting but we have found other uses for it since then.

It does have a pretty steep learning curve, especially if you're trying to parse information, instead of just sending it raw. Learning the Regular Expression language, to try and get it to pull out what you want, is a pretty steep learning curve upfront. The steep learning curve is specifically for IT Alerting, its features. And, for the API integrations, you've got to know how to write the REST API code if you want to use them.

The Everbridge system itself was fairly straightforward to learn.

An incident management feature would be nice because, as it stands now, you select different items when you're filling out a form to launch a notification. If those were more conditional it would help. Right now it just puts out whatever you put into the form, whereas, if you could specify a "yes" or "no" and it would input a different verbiage depending on the case, that would be nice to have, instead of having to spell out all the verbiage.

The only thing our users want, because they work 12-hour shifts and it times out if they're not using it, would be to stay logged in for at least 12 hours before it times out. The max is eight hours right now.

We haven't had any issues with stability. For the product as a whole, we have had one delayed notification and we've had the product for two and a half years now. We called support on that one and found out they were having a nationwide problem but it was fixed within two to three hours. They sent out a root-cause analysis a couple of hours after that, explaining to us what happened. They're pretty responsive.

That's the only delay we've had since we've had the overall Everbridge product.

In this budget cycle, we just purchased some more seats for notifications and we're trying to get all of our in-house staff on it. It was pretty simple. We called them, we told them what the deal was. They were willing to work with us, to work with it in the budget cycle process. As far as scaling up and working within the budget cycle, they understood all that and were really helpful in getting it worked out.

We don't have that many problems with Everbridge. The couple of times I've had to engage with tech support they've gotten right back to me, helped me figure it out. Even the one time it was something I was doing wrong, they were able to point me in the right direction and get me squared away. They replied quickly. I don't have anything bad to say about them.

We were using CodeRED. We needed some of the functionality Everbridge had that CodeRED didn't have. CodeRED was fairly solid and was a heck of a lot cheaper, because we were piggy-backed on with our Sheriff's Office. But the functionality of the internet management portion of Everbridge outweighed the cost difference.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. Everyone on the implementation team had a good understanding of it and, once Everbridge turns it on, they let you play with it, so that's good. And then they sent out a team to do training. We had a pretty good handle on it, so the training was more addressing our questions. They turned it on about a week before the training crew got out here, to let us start messing around in it. We were able to figure it out, so by the time the training crew got here, it was more like questions and answers, except for our PR staff who hadn't played with it at all. They got a full top-down, step one, step two, training, whereas the Admin folks got a bit more Q&A. They were really adaptable to what were trying to do.

We thought the base product was pretty reasonable. It can pricey once you start adding stuff on, but that's the same with anything. We have scaled up almost every year. We bought the base, 500 contacts, the thing they sell to airports, in our first year. Then we got the IT Alerting because we needed the email integration stuff and some of the scheduling features. This year we've gone up another step in contacts, from 500 to 1,000. We're investing in the system.

We were okay with CodeRED. The user interface was kind of clunky for how we were using it with the dispatchers. But that was more because of how we were doing it. For some of the commands, at the time, they didn't want electronic-sounding messages so they were making the dispatchers verbally record every message. Once we went with Everbridge, we got the command staff to be okay with electronic sounding messages; Everbridge is reliant on electronic messaging. Before, for whatever reason, they wanted voice messages and that's what CodeRED did really well. But it required a dispatcher to record it and it was a whole thing. Once we got everyone convinced that text messages are reliable, and that they'll get an email if the text message doesn't work, that there's an app - all that - it was a pretty easy sale after that.

Also, CodeRED called everything you had at the same time. With Everbridge you can have it switch methods every five minutes. CodeRED was "call everything, every time." It called your house phone, your cell phone, your work cell, your personal cell, your dog's cell, your cat's cell, your wife, your daughter. It called them all, all at the same time. That's why it was called CodeRED, because your whole house went on fire. IT Alerting can be set to call just one phone at a time. That was a big sell too.

Dig into the resources they have, like Everbridge University. Don't rely completely on the on-site training because it's only one day. The best way to learn is by doing. You need to get in there, push the buttons, pull the triggers, etc. My advice would be, when they turn it on, get in there and put in a couple of contacts and start sending messages, to get used to the interface. Take their online stuff, use all the resources they give you. Don't just rely on that one day of on-site training they provide, that's not going to do it for you.

You can go into Everbridge University and type in, "I want to know how to do 'x'," and there will be modules on how to do that. You can watch the courses and it gives you enough to get in there and start figuring it out. There is also an interactive user community.

We haven't gotten much into the API stuff. We need to. We're starting to use scheduling a little more. With our police and fire department and the air-com staff, the staff that I manage, we're trying to get more people involved with it. Because the scheduling is its own thing and it doesn't integrate with how they schedule their staff, it's been a little difficult getting them to stand that up. But that's more just trying to find someone there who is willing to keep that schedule in Everbridge up to date so we can make sure we're not waking up people who shouldn't be woken, and that we're alerting the people who need to know. That's what we're focusing on now.

We like it. It works great. If you ask the dispatchers who do 90 percent of the launches, it's leaps and bounds better than what we were doing before. Back then, they were having to call in and type in all these codes and verbalize the messages. If they misspoke they had to hang up and start over. It was a giant pain. With Everbridge, it's just fill out the form. If "x" is happening you click on that form, you fill it out and hit Go and it goes. You don't have to worry about whether the right person will get it because that's all been pre-programmed. They really like the ease of use.

This has been one of the better products that you buy off the shelf because it just works. With almost everything you buy that requires as much customization as something like this does, you're going to have problems, but we've had very few with Everbridge. It just works.

We went from a manual email system to an organized responsive automated system. It was able to improve our efficiency and improve everyone's responsiveness, because people were not responding to emails. 

It also improved our ability to capture everything in tickets, whereas before, emails and tickets were rarely, if ever, getting created.

The most important features are the scheduling capability and the integration with ServiceNow. The ease of putting in a replacement person who will cover for you, or if you want to switch with two people, this is very easy to do. It is very easy to capture the calendaring and make sure everybody is aware of it. There is ability for it to communicate back and forth with ServiceNow and our ticketing system. This is much easier and more real-time in its capturing what is happening when a ticket opens, a ticket is accepted for work, and it is closed out.

There is also the application that you can install on your phone, which the engineers really like. If allows you the flexibility to choose: Whether you notify your home phone or your cell phone, and whether you get a text first. You get choose in what order, so the flexibility for each engineer is very good.

I swapped two people's weeks, and at least from what I saw, I had to do each day individually. It would be nice if I could swap two people's weeks without having to do it each day. There may be a way to do it, but I just didn't find it, so I did it day-by-day. This would be a neat feature to have. 

It just runs. We have not had a single outage; nothing. There has not been a single issue with it in the time that we have had it running. It just works.

The best thing I could say about any system is that it just works. That is the highest compliment that anyone can give to a system. It is one less headache that I have because I know that it is up and running.

We are not a heavy usage, enormous company, but I see no limitations to the scalability of it. You could use this if you were a small company, and you could use this if you were a 4500 person U.S. company or a 200,000 person global company.

I could see how it would scale up very easily.

Tech support is excellent. They are very responsive. We are able to reach them very quickly. On a scale of one to 10, I would give them a 10. They are very quick about getting us answers when working with us.

Their account team is excellent. Their marketing team is excellent. 

We had a very manual system where we alerted everyone to all system alerts.

With Everbridge, we were able to set up a schedule where only people on call get notified, so everybody was not getting emails and having to somehow wake up in the middle of the night.

We were also able to split out our system alerts so we now have five-minute system alerts that the infrastructure team likes to see. However, we do not need to open up a ticket and have an engineer react to it. We have a separate one now where after 30 minutes, it creates a ticket and alerts an engineer to investigate. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. The configurations took us a day and a half to be completely set up. We saved the last half a day in case we ran into problems. After, a year or two of using it, never found a problem. Therefore, it was very easy to set up.

Their support staff and the installation/professional services team were great.

When implementing, talk to your account team and work with the installation team. Make sure you have a plan as to what you are looking for and work closely with the Everbridge team. They will get you where you need to go.

Their pricing is a good value and very reasonable. They are very upfront about their pricing. There is nothing confusing about it.

We were looking for an IT alerting system. A couple of my peers gave me a couple of different suggestions. I believe I might have met them originally at the ServiceNow Knowledge Conference, and we looked at a couple of other systems along with this. We had a team of people who reviewed different options and functions that each system had. Out of that evaulation, we selected Everbridge.

We evaluated PagerDuty as a potential option. However, the system feels like it is stuck a bit in the past.

I am pretty happy with the way it works. We are very happy with it. We have not made changes to it because it just works.

It does what it says it does. The application works. They have a long history, but the system is advanced and modern. It has a lot of great features and they keep adding to it.

The primary use is to engage, to notify, and engage IT team members when an outage is underway. We do use it for proactive notifications, but our primary use is to communicate with support-group team members when we need to get their attention and fix a problem.

Some of the features we were looking to achieve included proactive notifications, for a situation where we might have a database server that has 50 databases on it. That means if I shut down that database server for patching, all 50 of those databases are offline and multiple applications, anywhere from 50 or more, are also going to be taken offline. We use this Everbridge IT Alerting tool as a "polling" product to reach out to the stakeholders of those 50 databases and give them five options of day of week and time of day, and say, "We have to shut the server down. You get to have a voice in when we do so to minimize the impact on you as a business stakeholder." We've been leveraging the product to do some of those proactive outage notifications and polling capabilities as well.

We are also striving to integrate it with other parts of our IT operating ecosystem. We already use it to communicate when a monitoring alert triggers one of the reactive notifications, and we are seeking to implement more of a full loop between that event and an incident being opened in the service management system. We're not quite there yet, but we're walking in that direction.

What we were looking at was: "How do you shorten the time to restoration when a crisis is occurring?" That's really the key benefit of the out-of-the-box Everbridge IT Alerting functionality for us.

In terms of improvements to our organization, we're still on that journey. I've used the terminology with our friends at Everbridge a few times, where I associate this with the traditional "crawl, walk, and run" metaphor. One year ago when we launched, we were barely crawling. Then we started crawling fairly quickly. I would say we're now in the "toddling" stage where we walk, but we don't walk all that well yet. For us, it is a continual improvement journey. 

We are anticipating that over the next 12 to 36 months we're going to go from toddling to walking very upright and then into running.

Organizationally, we have gained some benefits already. Even in the first few months, we recognized or realized some of those benefits that I described above around shortening the time to resolution. 

What we envision getting as an additional organizational benefit is system consolidation. For example, we've got four different systems today that contain some of the data and capabilities that Everbridge can very naturally accommodate. We just haven't moved there yet. Over time, we'll see some reduced cost in infrastructure, reduced cost in application maintenance and complexity, some improved consistency across these procedures as a result of using one system versus many. This should contribute to further reducing the time to restore service. In the end, we get benefits adding up over time, where time to restore gets better and better, and our ability to leverage the platform in multiple ways gets better and better.

The engagement component is the most valuable, and what I mean by that is, if I were to send out an alert notification to a half-dozen people when a major IT crisis occurs, what I want to be able to do is remediate the issue as fast as I possibly can. For the sake of the business, I want to minimize downtime. What we were seeing in our prior systems, in our prior procedures and capabilities was that it would take quite a long time to get the right people to the table, making the right decisions to restore service.

One of the key drivers for us, and this is still one of the key benefits for us, is that Everbridge IT Alerting helps to pull those right people in very quickly through a collection of utilities where you can say, "I want to notify more than one person at a time. I want to escalate at my discretion and via rules within the system." It enables you to pull all the people into these bridge calls.

Let's say for example you have somebody in a group who is not online, but they are the on-call primary. The first iteration of a notification might go to them, but I can - depending on the nature of the issue - send a communication to the entire group under the anticipation that the primary on-call might not respond first. 

In recent weeks we've been talking to Everbridge about leveraging some new functionality that they're demploying right now around orchestration. Imagine a full, closed-loop event remediation: auto-remediation. A server throws an alert. We catch it in our monitoring tool. We page or SMS text, using Everbridge IT Alerting. A group member receives that text and responds to the text with "Option One." Option one can say, "I want to go ahead and execute an orchestration that will automatically stop and restart the services on that box or even reboot the box." That would, again, further reduce service restoration time, and significantly reducing the manual engagement of logging a ticket, logging onto the box, restarting the box or the servers or services manually. All of that can be done through automation. We're not there yet, but that's what we're talking about right now, as a part of our next wave of moving along the crawl, walk, run journey.

In terms of what could be improved, almost always, there is something that could be improved. I've been in this industry long enough to know that there is no perfect system. All the good ones still offer opportunities for getting better. I think if you were to look from their point of view, they would also see themselves in a crawl, walk, run journey. They may be further along in their walk, but they're probably not in the "Olympic sprint" or "Olympic marathon" stage yet. They've got lots of potential, room for feature enhancements, improvements.

A couple of key ones might include - and I think they are working towards these things - analytics. If I want to do sophisticated reporting and analysis of the data that's being captured in IT Alerting, at the moment, the reporting interface is immature. They're very helpful. They get it. They're listening to us, but it's weak. It's growing. It's getting better. Reporting and analytics would be one space. 

Their integration capabilities are still progressing, but not quite where we'd like to see them yet. They're moving there with that orchestration capability where they're seeing the potential of an API-first mentality. So instead of trying to build custom connections into everything, you open up APIs to allow other systems to talk to IT Alerting and allow IT Alerting to talk to other systems. There is room for improvement, but they get it. They're listening in that space, too.

Sure, there are things they can be doing better, but in partnership with them, us among other customers, I think we've got their ear, and they're being very proactive about listening.

We have encountered some issues with stability. The shorter answer is, "Yes, it's stable." 

The longer answer would be, we've had a couple of outages, and we had some very deep discussions with Everbridge on the fact that I can't alert people of an outage in my environment if I'm having an outage in their environment. That's bad, and they know it. They recognize it. They acknowledge that. 

We did have one problem within the first 30 to 60 days of going live where we had a day-and-a-half outage of the platform, and frankly, that's unacceptable. They heard that from us very directly. Since then, they've mitigated that by expanding their architecture and changing the method of their architecture to be more highly available and robust on their side. 

Since then, the stability has been top-drawer. We've had a few minor issues around things like messages not being delivered. Part of it is our expectation, that they deliver every message, 100 percent, 24/7, but I also absolutely recognize that we are literally all over the globe. We're everywhere in the world today as Cargill footprint. That means we're trying to deliver messages in near real-time, 20,000 miles away under infrastructure circumstances that could be very poor. It might be in a third-world nation. It might be in a place where there is no cellular signal or their cellular partnerships are not as well-built or professionally associated as in some other parts of the world. So sometimes, messages don't get delivered, but I would say that is a very rare challenge for us. Everbridge, along with any other service provider in their space, will have to face those once in a while, and I think they're very good at running interference with those "edge" connection points that are difficult to navigate. They're very good at it. Occasionally, we see a message dropped or a message not delivered, but it is rare, and I think they are doing everything they can to handshake with the providers around the world in a way that continues to minimize and, maybe someday, eliminate those one-offs.

I think scalability was part of that architectural review we did about a year ago where, when they encountered that outage. One of our challenges to them was, "If you're a cloud-first solution yourself, how do you not build your platform to be highly scalable?" Literally, spin up, spin down, any time you want or any time the demand suggests it.

Initially, the scalability was good but not great. Since then, I think it now borders on great. They've learned some lessons. They've restructured their platform a bit, and it is highly scalable. I've never seen a performance problem.

We have about 155,000 workers around the globe at Cargill, and there are maybe 5,000 who log in with some regularity to the platform to do message queuing or message sending or message response or self-service profile updates; I can log in and change my cell phone number, or specify that I want to use my cell phone as my primary and my work phone as my secondary. That capability has never been met with any comments from our community saying, "It doesn't perform well."

Their first-line tech support is good, but I think their method of providing support deserves some very real consideration. What I mean is, when I spend X dollars buying a product, our expectation for support is very high. I want you, as a vendor, to support your product 24/7 and give me appropriate response windows. If it's not urgent, I'm okay with you not being imminent, but if it is urgent, I want you on the phone right away.

They've pushed a Professional Services model where they're saying, for you to get this kind of attention or support for either "How do I" questions or "What could we do a little differently?" or those kinds of things, they're suggesting we buy a bucket of Professional Services hours. I've resisted that from day one, and I have not yet given into that request because my perspective is, I already paid you for that. I bought the licensing and I bought support as a percentage, if you will, of the licensing price. That's what maintenance is for.

To me, Professional Services is more an act of deeper consulting where I might say, "I want to actually go build an integration that's not leveraging your API strategy or methodology, so it's going to need some custom development work," or something like that. I get that. That's a pretty classic Professional Services engagement. But to hear, when I call you and ask a question like, "Well, how do I do this?" an answer like, "This is why you should buy a bucket of Professional Services hours," it feels a little "game-y" to me. I don't really like that. I'm working with Everbridge on that, too. I think that they're still wrestling with what their support model looks like internally and what their Professional Services business strategy is. I think they're trying to work their way through those growing pains themselves, but my gut reaction is, it's not a great start to say, "In order to support you, you have to pay me more."

Their technical skill on the support side is good. Their model is a little bit shaky.

I realized this, sadly, after the sale. I think it's partly because those same growing pains were part of what they were going through as a part of our normal sales cycle discussions. So they never put on the table that to get really top-level support, it will cost you more, until after everything was already deployed. We were probably well into our first quarter of deployment when the suggestion was, "I think you should buy a bucket of hours." It caught me, quite frankly, by surprise because I felt that we should have been talking about that during the sales cycle.

They're going to find us really reluctant to write another check for what we would consider standard practice for product support. We have a very good relationship with Everbridge, so I would not want to send the wrong signals. I think they'll be very open-minded to hearing that kind of feedback. I don't know if they'll back down completely from their business position on Professional Services and support, but it's certainly going to be a conversation I'll continue having with them.

We had an incumbent solution that had been in place for about seven years. The principal reason for switching was that the incumbent was losing momentum in the marketplace for traditional IT communications and engagement, to get people to the table and fix problems. The incumbent was slipping in the market. They were not putting money into R&D. They were not developing their platform at the same pace that some of the natural competitors were.

We did look at them as a part of our solution-selection activity. We absolutely kept the incumbent in the ring and had great conversations with them about what's missing and what they were going to do next. In fact, they were acquired by another company during those solution-selection discussions, and we were very uncertain about whether or not the acquiring company would invest or ingest. Would they swallow this thing up and sort of bury it under the rug, or would they invest in making it be a more competitive product? 

I think, in hindsight - it's been over a year since we made this selection and about a year since we deployed IT Alerting - I'd say that the casual observation would be that the incumbent did not gain any ground. If anything, they may have continued to lose some ground. For us, it was, "You don't have the feature functionality that we really want, and you're not really making progress towards that in your own market space." Whereas Everbridge and a couple of others were providing some good indicators that they were stepping up their game as opposed to backing off their game.

I wasn't actually doing the install, I was leading the program and working very closely with the folks who were administrators of the tool. The feedback I got was that it was actually very intuitive until you'd get a little bit into the weeds. Some of the complications of the environment resulted in a few challenging topics. They weren't showstoppers. We never felt like we couldn't keep the ball rolling

It was a little bit of both. The initial response felt very reasonable, very intuitive to the extent it's possible, but it's a sophisticated enough system that there were parts of it where you scratch your head and you say, "Well, where do I go for this? How do I log in and change the administrative configuration of group names?" That sort of thing.

That's where some of our initial Professional Services help came in. We did pay for the implementation Professional Services. That was worthwhile, it was appropriate to do that, and they helped a lot. Wherever we did find some of those points of confusion, those were good learning experiences for us. They were good usability conversations with them.

They continue to develop, and they're very good at taking feedback from their customers and figuring out how, or if, to include that feedback in future releases. And their release cycles have gotten faster. When we first signed up with them, they were probably doing two a year, and now I think they're closer to four a year. And some of what we fed into them is already making its appearance in their code base.

One of the things we were attempting to measure when we established the program is time to restore service. One of the things that IT Alerting helps us do is bring an IT service back online faster than we did before. One of the ways it does that is by getting those right parties to the table at the right time. Our mean time to restore, or mean time to repair, has diminished by a couple of percentage points, saving the company upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That was one of our key measures going in, and it's been demonstrable so far.

For us, the pricing is a good value. I can't say whether or not their list pricing looks favorable to everyone who's checking, but I can say that the process of sourcing and procurement with them was very professional, comfortable, and friendly. The negotiations were done well on both sides, and in the end, I'd say the price was very effective.

My suggestion would be, do your homework. If you know what the marketplace will support, I think it is fairly traditional. Not every market or every product fits this, but it's pretty normal that list prices are designed to be discounted. Very few, especially on the enterprise scale, are going to pay full sticker price for a software product. So do your homework, know where the discounting can get you, and know what you're willing to pay. Because if you say, "This has a value of X for me as an organization," if you articulate your position well, you have some very real opportunity to get either close to or at what you perceive to be the real value of the product in your negotiations. It's never an easy step but, done well, I think that people will find that Everbridge is a great listener and is willing to meet in the middle.

We also looked at TelAlert and xMatters.

We went through a pretty traditional solution-selection activity where we prepared and documented our requirements for the market leaders and included our incumbent, an existing solution that was doing some of what Everbridge does. In the end, one of our key selection criteria was relationship, and Cargill and Everbridge already had an agreement in place for their business continuity product, non-IT, which is used to do things like notify employees when there is a weather event or a security or concern, a risk event in a particular region of the world. We were already using that product, and it was an Everbridge relationship that was already in place. One of our deciding factors was, "How strong is that relationship?"

Scope the project well. What I mean by that is, don't bite off more than you can chew, but don't do less than you need to do. Scoping it well means that you've identified the happy medium of, "I'm going to get great value to start, but I'm going to get more value as we continue to grow into the solution." That's the approach we took. We said, "Hey, if I can get the 80/20 rule applied, where 80 percent of what we're expecting to get out of the gate is achievable in our first deployment, that's pretty solid." If the other 20 percent isn't crucial - figure out how to prioritize what you do need and what you don't need - it's okay to let it go. 

Part of what we saw with our own project was the danger of scope-creep, where we said, "If our first objective is a like-for-like replacement of the incumbent, then be prepared to sacrifice some golden opportunities if those golden opportunities will cost us time and money that we don't have right now."

If we said, "Implementation date is an important milestone and cost of implementing is an important measurement," then I need to measure inside of those scoping guardrails. Don't do more than you can handle, but don't do less than what you need. I think we accomplished that pretty well. I think we sacrificed a couple things that several of our stakeholders would have loved to see out of the gate, but it would have cost us time and money that we weren't really prepared to spend.

I would start out with rating this product at eight out of 10 because there is always room to improve. I'm not sure I'd rate anybody a 10. I've been in this for a long, long time. I don't know that I've ever seen a true knock-your-socks-off 10. But this solution is a solid eight in that they provide the core functionality we were always interested in obtaining, and they are very engaged at the table in discussing how they get better and how their getting better can help us get better.

Escalation and incident management.

We have been able to quantify improvements in escalation and time to resolution. It has decreased timeframes and improved resolution by 35 - 40 percent.

We used to have one individual handling a call, along with other duties. So at times, they would have to step away from those other duties to handle the call or reach out to someone else. This solution has allowed them to be on the call for questions, while still being able to escalate outward.

• Incident management
• Ease of integrations

It could use more enhancement type integrations, but no improvements to functionality are needed.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Technical support is helpful.

We did not have a previous solution. We were looking at solutions to allow us to better streamline escalation and incident management between teams.

Straightforward. It is software as a service. We had a brief setup and training session.

Pricing is reasonable, based on different customer types.

PagerDuty.

The service and support teams are very knowledgeable and willing to work with you on improving overall functionality and enhancements.