xMatters Reviews

We have two instances of xMatters. One is for IT alerting, and one is for business continuation. 

We leverage our IT instance to notify different IT groups, such as system administrators or web developers, and then escalate an issue to a specific group.

We utilize it for disaster recovery to be able to send out messages to either the entire company or a more granular group of individuals, such as a specific location or specific departments.

We're able to communicate better with specific groups or offices. We didn't have that capability or granularity before. It has helped in that regard.

Automation of our incident notification process has increased our capability to respond. We can not only alert a whole group of people. We can also configure escalations so that one person is notified, and then it continues up the escalation if it is not responded to.

It has helped us to build workflows that meet our needs. It is important for us because it just helps create additional efficiencies. If we can configure workflows, that typically helps us be more efficient when there is an issue. xMatters workflows have helped us to address issues proactively.

The targeted and content-rich notifications have helped to reduce response times in our organization, but I don't have the metrics.

Its on-call schedules and streamlined escalations have helped to reduce Sev-1 incidents in our organization.

It has been useful for IT alerting and business continuation.

When it comes to customizing on-call schedules, rotations, and escalations, it is very flexible. There is only one thing that we've not been able to do, but if a capability is not there, you can always enter an enhancement request. They're very interested in what we're doing as a customer and what we're looking for. It is very easy to use and intuitive as compared to other similar solutions.

We have integrated it primarily with Jira. We use Jira for our help desk system, and then we can escalate a help desk ticket to a specific group of people for our IT instance. For example, if there was an issue with the server and a ticket was created, we could escalate that to our server team. The integrations that we have done were good and easy to set up.

We use xMatters’ REST API, and it is easy to use. 

We use xMatters logs as part of our operations. If needed, we do review the logs.

Additional built-in integrations with other applications would be an area of improvement.

I have been using this solution for just over three years.

Its stability is very good.

Its scalability is very good. We probably have about 20 to 25 uses in total. For the IT instance, it is our IT team that is using the instance. For business continuation, it is our HR team. We have plans to increase the usage of the product.

It is very good, but there is always room for improvement. Their support can be improved in terms of the initial response times and getting an engineer on the line. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

We didn't use any other solution previously.

On the IT instance side, it required preparation in terms of figuring out the groups of people to whom we wanted to send the notification. It involved defining and building those groups. On the business continuation side, it was primarily importing our user data so that we could properly communicate with specific locations and/or teams of people.

In terms of maintenance, it is a SaaS solution. The only real maintenance required on our side is to make sure that our end-user data that is imported into the solution is correct. We export our user data from one system. We then make sure that it is formatted correctly, and after that, we import it into xMatters. Its maintenance takes about 20 minutes per week.

We have seen a return on investment.

It seemed comparable or more reasonable than some of the other solutions, at least when we evaluated it. There are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Its cost is good, given the breadth of features provided by xMatters.

We did evaluate a few different solutions prior to making the decision to implement xMatters. We went with xMatters because it seemed like it had more flexibility and capabilities, and it could also be integrated with our ticketing system.

I would advise understanding what you're trying to gain out of bringing in this product, and when you do, be ready to get it configured. There is a little bit of lead time, but configuration and setup are fairly easy.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is to be organized. If you're using it for emergency alerting, then be ready for whatever your needs are.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It is mostly used to schedule our on-call system to support our customers. We use it a lot to schedule people, put in absences, etc. We also use it to see the other teams that we can contact.

We have integrated it with Slack to see who is on-call. We do a query on Slack, and it just brings the information back from there. The integration was pretty easy. We just had to install the app, and after that, we got it going. 

It brought efficiency in terms of how quickly we resolve matters and how quickly we can get in touch with the person who is actually on-call. It has definitely helped us with efficiency in that. 

It has helped us in building workflows that meet our needs. We have such a wide network of teams. We are all across the globe, and to be able to interact with people at a short notice and be able to schedule where we know what's happening has been really good.

Its targeted, content-rich notifications have helped to reduce response times in our organization. We are able to set up notifications through our phones and through the system. So, we are notified of things as they come.

It saves a significant amount of time because I get the notification immediately on my phone when things are not working, and I'm able to quickly say "I'm on it," or "I'm resolving it." It is really helpful to have that integration. So, there is definitely a significant amount of time savings.

Being able to split the week however we want is definitely most valuable. We can create shifts and also see other teams' schedules. It is a very easy search to do these things.

Its intuitiveness and flexibility when it comes to customizing on-call schedules, rotations, and escalations are pretty good. It is pretty easy to use. It doesn't take that long to onboard people on this.

We cannot go back in time to check out the previous schedules that we had. We can only see them moving forward. I wish we were able to go back and see the previous schedules that we had. That's the biggest thing.

I have probably been using this solution for the past two years. We started using it when we moved to having on-call.

It is pretty stable. We didn't have any issues with it.

We have about 200 people who use it. We use Slack, Jira, and xMatters for our on-call work. We have already integrated it with Slack, but I'm not sure how it works with Jira. I don't know if it can be integrated with Jira. That is something that we will have to explore.

I have not contacted them myself, and I don't know if my company had to do it.

I have not used a similar solution previously.

I am an end-user of this solution. We were all given logins to use it, and we just started using it.

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't seem like it needs a lot of maintenance because of the scope of how much we are using it or what we use it for.

We don't use xMatters in full scale. We haven't tapped into the full potential of the platform. We only use just a part of it. We don't use its logs as part of our operations, and we also don't use the REST API or coding to expand the flexibility or functionality of workflows. Similarly, we haven't used xMatters to automate our incident notification process. We use Jira for that. We also haven't incorporated xMatters into our application delivery workflows.

The workflows haven't helped us to address issues proactively, and its on-call schedules and streamlined escalations haven't helped to reduce Sev-1 incidents in our organization.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. There are things like having to remember when we were scheduled, but there are also some really neat features. It is easy to be able to get notifications, set up the app, and schedule absences. It is a pretty straightforward solution.

We use xMatters to handle system alerts. Generally, we use xMatters as an automated process in particular systems. For example, if the source detected an issue, it will use xMatters to alert the team member to resolve that issue.

xMatters is utilized as part of our system monitoring and alerting.

From the support team side, my focus is more account management, which is my primary task.

The end user accesses xMatters logs. As the support team of xMatters, we use their logs for troubleshooting, e.g., to see when an event is triggered, the process of that event, who was notified, and whether the delivery of the message was successful or not. If we cannot resolve a user's inquiry, then we will always work with xMatters' support engineering team to conduct further analysis.

Based on my support experience, it seems like our end users can integrate xMatters into event notifications and other applications successfully. Occasionally, we get support inquiries, essentially trying to understand how a particular functionality will work. If the functionality failed to work as expected, then we have always been able to get solutions from xMatters' support engineering team.

Here and there, we have made use of coding to expand the flexibility or functionality of xMatters workflows. I have created some custom workflow setups. For example, as part of account management, we do a scheduled process that will notify all the inactive users by sending out a notification via xMatters. It will ask them if they still need their account or not. Overall, the workflow is very simple, and the one that I built is not complex.

xMatters supports our usage and what our end users are trying to accomplish. As long as all our end users are supported on their operations, then as a support team, we are good with the product. 

The feature that I have found to be most valuable is the entire alert notification configuration, having an external system to trigger events that will process the alert to the supporting team. If a system is down, then you need to get it attention. Sometimes, it cannot wait until the next day. Therefore, how xMatters provides this type of integration is critical.

It is well-rounded. An individual will have to learn the UI. The UI and controls are easy to set up. 

The end user team has quite an extensive customized integration with other applications. Thus, I can only assume that our end users are heavily using xMatters.

I would like some minor UI changes. I believe I filed some enhancement requests with xMatters. For example, in one area, they have some way for you to look at a particular functionality with different sets of reporting UI. However, that same reporting UI is not yet available with some other functionalities. Essentially, in their existing functionality, the xMatters application does an excellent job, but in other functionalities within their UI, they don't have that. On the back-end, they are related. Instead of one click where you can see everything, right now you need to go to different areas to access similar information. It would be nice to have everything in one place. While they have an excellent element A, I am hoping that they could just simply make that feature also available in their element B.

I have been using it for about a year and a half. 

I believe my company has been using xMatters for quite a while. About a year and a half ago, the global infrastructure application support team took over the ownership, supporting the product usage. So, I have been doing functional support for this particular application for about a year and a half.

The xMatters application is very stable. They also always keep the customer up to date with advanced notifications, e.g., if there is any scheduled system downtime. Usually, those downtimes are minutes. However, they will notify their clients when those things happen and are always able to provide the root cause, such as what took place and why the system was impacted. So, as a customer of xMatters, we never get left in the dark, trying to see what is going on.

All the maintenance is done from their end. They also proactively reach out when there is something causing some type of configuration abnormality in xMatters, which would be caused by perhaps one of our configurations. They will proactively reach out, and say, "Hey, you probably want to get in touch with your end user and help them fix it accordingly." However, that is really rare. In the past year and a half, this happened just one time. There is one team who has a workflow that contained an element that is no longer supported, and that was resolved very quickly.

xMatters is extremely scalable and extensible. The design gives you a lot of freedom on the applications that you want to integrate with xMatters. Therefore, they already have a large inventory of different application templates that you can utilize. 

There has never been an interruption because the traffic and the volume are high. This means that our external system can properly be integrated with xMatters, which will handle an alert without delay nor compromising the quality or timeliness of our delivery.

Our end user can be a group supervisor, meaning that they are the people who manage the group and on-call rosters. There are also developer roles. Those are the users who are doing workflow with development and integration setup. Lastly, there are just general users who are part of the on-call roster. They will get notifications when something happens that they need to take action against. 

xMatters doesn't own our content. They provide support activity, assisting our users in configuration, but xMatters itself is very intuitive. 

I would rate the support as nine or above (out of 10). xMatters' support engineering team is bar none with the service that they provide. It is always a pleasure working with them because they get stuff done. Other vendors need to use xMatters' support model as the model to follow.

They are very detail-oriented. They are always clear and concise. I can share their findings with my end user because they provide them in layman's terms, even non-technical end users can understand them.

Positive

Our team inherited this product. Therefore, we were not involved in the decision-making or evaluation of the product.

We went through the training material. It is like learning any other application. For example, if you are going to be doing workflow development, then you need to understand the workflow design and UI. Same as if you are going to set up a group, you need to know how to set up on-call scheduling and learn how to manage your team's roster for the group. 

Overall, it is very intuitive and straightforward. xMatters is one of the applications that does provide a lot of online documentation, in which they do an excellent job.

xMatters on-call schedules have helped to reduce Sev-1 incidents in our organization. This is based on users using the latest incident alert functionality to get their activities done.

You should perhaps arrange an evaluation or trial to just test it out. Get your feet wet. That is so important. If you don't try it, then you won't know. 

In regards to all the functionality xMatters provides, I learn every day while working with end users. I like to say that I would never consider myself as an expert of tools, instead I am a jack-of-all-trades. That is why my learning will never stop.

I would rate them as 8.5 out of 10 since no application is perfect.

We use it as an integration point with our monitoring solution, which is Micro Focus Operations Bridge Manager. We also have an integration point with Micro Focus Service Manager.

xMatters helped to automate our incident notification process. We generate incident tickets right from our alerts. That ability is excellent because we're able to respond immediately and indicate that someone has taken ownership of the alert.

We also use the coding to expand the functionality of xMatters workflows so that we can ingest information from a security solution. That will then generate an incident in Micro Focus Service Manager.

In addition, we have seen reduced response times, and the streamlined escalations have helped to reduce priority-one incidents in our organization.

The most valuable feature is getting alerts out to my user base. xMatters is the only solution that I know that has robust scheduling, calendaring for groups, and that provides very good delineation of who gets alerted and on which devices they receive their alerts.

It provides very robust and flexible means for scheduling and escalation. We use it quite extensively for making sure that we can schedule groups and the individual who is on call within them. We can make sure that, during office hours, everyone on a team receives alerts, but only the on-call person receives them after-hours via an SMS message. We use the calendaring quite extensively to make sure that we can schedule our shifts. Most of our groups include some form of escalation so that if somebody doesn't respond to an alert within prescribed timeframes, it will then send an alert to someone else.

The xMatters REST API is also very good when it comes to process and information customization.

I would like xMatters to provide users with the capability of administering it on their own. I do a lot of hand-holding with them.

I have been using xMatters IT Management for 11 years.

The stability of xMatters is excellent. It's probably the most stable piece of software that I'm responsible for.

To my knowledge, it's extremely scalable, although we have not scaled it at this point.

Currently, we have 170 end-users. 

Everbridge's technical support for the solution is better than excellent. Every one of the support analysts that I have dealt with for the last several years has been able to provide a very quick response and a resolution to any problems that we've had.

Positive

We used another solution, but that was more than 15 years ago. I believe it was called Automation Point, but it doesn't exist anymore and it didn't have an integration into Micro Focus Operations Bridge Manager or the predecessor product.

In terms of the preparation needed to start using xMatters, we had to do a full security audit.

We get value for what we pay. I'm not looking for a return on investment, I'm looking for functionality. The value is in the alerting functionality.

When it comes to integrating xMatters with the Micro Focus solutions, I wouldn't say it's excellent, but it's certainly more intuitive than most integrations that I've done.

Overall, I recommend xMatters regularly to people. I don't recommend other solutions.

We're relatively light on use cases. We primarily use it for notifications. We're not using the Incident Management module, but we are using the SOAP service. So, we use it for integration and for holding all of our rotas and groups, and that's our main use case. Our local teams go into xMatters to invoke those groups based upon the tickets that get created in ServiceNow. They'll be for a particular team, and that team's on-call rota is held in xMatters.

It has reduced the time to engage engineers. This reduced time leads to improved ticket resolution and ultimately, to improved service provision for our clients, which is the ultimate gain. Our systems are down for less time because the engineers are engaged much faster.

We also quite heavily use subscriptions. We use those by way of just simple notifications to third-party stakeholders, and that has proven to be a big gain because it makes customers aware of the incidents. In addition to the resolving engineers, you can add third-party stakeholders in the notifications. Customers have been very keen on taking up subscriptions because it gives notifications to their stakeholders about the status changes of an incident and what's going on. I know that has been very well received.

We have automated our incident notification process with xMatters via subscription. So, essentially, as the support groups and engineers have been engaged to go and resolve, we also have numerous subscriptions set up so that a client's stakeholders and our internal stakeholders are notified at the same time. They would be client delivery managers from our side of the fence and then the actual client contact points on the client's side. It just gives us a very quick, easy, and effective way to increase notification awareness, and it has been very well received by the clients because they were somewhat in the dark previously. They would raise a ticket, and it would go to a resolving group, and then they would just wait, whereas this way, they're more in the loop but without being swamped with the technical detail. It is just at the awareness level, but it has proven to be very popular.

We have built workflows that meet our needs via xMatters. They're important to us. They provide very good and very configurable automation. We've found them to be very configurable and portable. We can make a workflow for client A, export it, and reimport it for client B. If it needs to be customized, we make a few changes, and it is up and running for client B in next to no time. We found the workflows to be very intuitive, very powerful, and very well received by those who would benefit from this functionality. We've found it to be a real win.

We've done custom coding where required. Most of the time, our use cases are quite simple. Wherever required, we have done extra coding, but it has been minimal. We have a couple of webhook-type workflows, and we've added extra code in there to essentially filter. There are a lot of alerts coming out of a particular system, and we've added some custom code in there to only activate certain elements of the workflow against certain priorities. 

We were able to customize the workflow so that it is only for targeted incidents or particular criteria. It expanded the flexibility or functionality of xMatters. We were able to pick an out-of-the-box workflow and customize it to summarize clients only in particular trigger cases. They wanted everything captured but only certain things to be raised. So, we had to do an amount of coding in there to interrogate their initial methods, make the webhook do certain things, and make the workflow do certain things based upon the invalid data. We found that very easy to achieve. The customer was very pleased.

The automated callouts, without a doubt, are valuable. They have been a huge gain for our company. Previous to xMatters, there was no real management of the on-call resources or rotas. So, having that centralized and automated has been a huge gain. 

The support groups themselves are the most useful part.

It is incredible in terms of intuitiveness and flexibility of customization. It is an excellent product. It is very usable. We are the local administration within our organization, and with the tool itself being incredibly intuitive and the support being possibly the best I've ever encountered, it is a joy to work on. It is very intuitive and very easy to work on.

We've got some webhook-type integrations with standalone systems that we have from our various clients. These integrations were very easy to do. A lot of applications that you'd like to integrate with already exist as modules in xMatters. So, a lot of the work is done for you, or it certainly leads you through it very clearly. These integrations are very easy and very intuitive to set up.

We have used the REST API as well, and it was very good. We found it to be very powerful and very well supported in terms of the API endpoints. If we needed an endpoint that was missing or wasn't available, we were able to get that added easily. It has been very good.

The only thing that has caught us out a little bit is that on certain screens, you don't have the same admin options. There should be more consistency with the admin options because not all screens provide you with the same options. As an administrator, it feels like they should always be there. For example, on some screens, there is an Export button that provides fantastic, detail-rich exports, which obviously are very handy because then you can, as an administrator, do your administration, and extract what has been done to share with or prove to others. However, the Export button is not always present, and on the screens where it isn't, you miss it. You're like, "Oh, where's the Export button?", which can be quite problematic. There should be more consistency in the UI in terms of available options for anything that is referenced data or configurable. If you can put it in, there should be a way to run an export function to essentially pull it out. That's the only improvement that I can really think of. There is a little inconsistency, but I believe that has been simply explained to us. xMatters has been developed and redeveloped many times. So, different hands have touched it, and I guess not everyone thinks that an Export button is required, but we've certainly found it to be a very useful function.

It predates me, and I think we're into our third year.

It is near perfect. It is one of the most stable pieces of software that I've ever used in more than 20 years in IT. It is an incredibly stable platform.

With our limited experience, it seems to be perfectly scalable. You can make it do as much or as little as required. The ability to make those changes very quickly in a live environment is very good because if a new requirement comes in, we can turn it around almost as quickly as we can type. There are very few barriers to stop you from scaling as required.

In our environment, we have less than a thousand users.

Their support is exemplary. I would rate them a 10 out of 10 or even higher. In 20 years in IT, without a shadow of a doubt, it is the best support I've ever received from a vendor. They are so attentive and knowledgeable. They present themselves with such a friendly and family-based vibe or approach that they stand out from the crowd. You almost want it to go wrong so that you have an excuse to speak to their support. They are exemplary. 

I cannot speak highly enough of the quality of their interactions, whether that's raising support through the support links on the tool itself, or when we have a monthly catch-up call with Jamie Mallon. He always comes to us with tons of knowledge, tons of new news, and loads of warmth and engagement, and that's pretty standard. They do things in a very cool way. The quality of support that I get from them is very noticeable as compared to any other vendor I've worked with, bigger or smaller. The xMatters guys are definitely the best. They do things in a brilliant way, and for Everbridge, their new parent company, there is a lot to learn. They should be adopting as much of xMatters' style as they can because they really are excellent.

We didn't have a single solution. People were passing around spreadsheets, and we had a Lotus Notes database that some people could access to refer to the information, but not everyone. So, it was essentially just a mess. From that point of view, xMatters has just given a huge boost. xMatters is far superior in the way that it is highly configurable, and its features really support the actual use cases of an engineer. If an engineer is absent, they mark themselves as away, and if you have set the rotas correctly, xMatters will automatically schedule in a replacement resource. That's a very simple thing, but without xMatters, that was a very laborious and manual task for engineers. If they forget to do it, then suddenly, you don't find anyone on call. The way xMatters automates this is just far superior to the previous solution that we had.

It predates my time on the team. So, I don't know about the initial setup. 

Its maintenance is practically zero. From our side, we're primarily doing account creations as the talent pool of resolving engineers changes and shifts. We also configure any new workflow or webhook requirements that come through. We set up the groups and support users, but they configure their own rotas because we like to get them to own that side of it so that they can look after their own team going forward. We initially support them through the rota creations to make sure it is all set up in the way they need it to be operational.

This maintenance time varies depending on the demand. We've got a relatively stable take-up at this point. At its busiest, we were spending half a working week on it. At this stage, where we've got things configured and pretty stable, we are down to a very minimal amount of hands-on support that is required from our end, which is great. The system just runs. We're called into it when there's an issue or when there's a new take on of some kind, but for the majority of it, we're able to just let it run and do its thing.

Three people work on xMatters day-to-day. We're support engineers, and this is one of the things that we look after. We support it in addition to numerous other systems we all look after. We don't look after just xMatters. There is not a great deal of work for us to deal with on a day-to-day basis when it comes to xMatters.

I'm not involved with the numbers in that regard, but logically, we must have had an ROI because we've seen service gains. We've seen increased efficiency. It obviously passed in terms of time and cost savings across the board. All of our incidents are dealt with quicker now because the engineers are engaged so much quicker.

I can't really comment on the value in terms of comparison. It could be the most expensive product in the world. It could also be the cheapest, or it could be safely in the middle. 

It feels like good value in the sense that the service is excellent. The people above me who look at such things have renewed it a couple of times, and I think they would have thought whether it was good value, whether it was wildly overpriced, or whether there were better and cheaper alternatives. So, from that perspective, the pricing is fair and proper.

I would advise others to go for it. It is great. My advice would be to engage with the xMatters resources themselves because they will engage and guide a potential new customer very fairly. They won't oversell. They will get you the correct solution, and they will be very helpful in helping you to get that to work. So, my advice would be to go for it 100%.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. Nothing is perfect, and there is always room for improvement, but it is very hard to see where. This is an excellent product.

We use xMatters as our automated on-call engagement system. We use ServiceNow for major incident management and processing for the university's IT services. When there is an incident of sufficient priority, impact, or urgency, we make use of the integration between ServiceNow and xMatters. xMatters contacts our staff members who are on call to make them aware that there's an issue going on. It gets them the information they need to log in and fix whatever might be happening. xMatters can do a lot of other things, but we use it primarily for our major incident response and automated on-call processes.

In 2019, we embarked on a "lights out" process. We had staff members sitting in our operations center, 24/7/365. They had to watch the screens and make sure, when something went "bump" in the night or something went down, to physically pick up the phone and call somebody. In December of 2019, were able to bring those staff members back into a nine-to-five type of job, repurpose them, and move them into other roles. We let the machines do the hard work of notifying people if something goes wrong. xMatters was a big part of that because it allowed our managers to maintain their own rosters, and cell phones didn't have to be handed from one person to another. The process just worked really well. That was of benefit for our central IT.

We also onboarded our institution's public safety/police department. Before, if they had an issue where everything went down and they couldn't do anything from their office, they would either call or walk over to the IT building and find somebody in the operations center, and then the operation center would call somebody from networks. Now, we have onboarded several select people from the police station. They have the ability to use the xMatters mobile app to hit a big red button that contacts our major incident managers directly, without them having to do much else. That means they don't have to physically come work with us or find us. We were able to replace that physical process that existed prior to 2019 with a fully automated process now.

The automation provided by xMatters has helped us respond to incidents. It puts the responsibility for responding on the groups and the people who are responsible for providing service. They're getting a notification when something happens that meets a certain threshold. That's in contrast to the subjective process we had in place previously where the person who was in the operations center decided not to call somebody for whatever reason. Now that it's automated and everybody is playing by the same rules, there have been improvements on the monitoring side of things and in how things are architected. They know that if something goes down, they're going to get a call. Having the managers and the people closer to the process, with the ability to manage their own rosters, results in a little bit more responsibility, rather than just passing it off to the person who's sitting in the operations center.

The automated notification process has made people understand that they have to fix things before they go "bump" in the night. They know there is no longer a person sitting in our operations center who might decide not to wake somebody up. The machines are going to detect that something has gone wrong and they're going to notify xMatters, and xMatters is going to notify the group. Tangentially, that results in people proactively fixing things ahead of time. In turn, with people being a little bit more proactive in handling things, issues don't get up to a priority-one level as much. But when it happens, xMatters does its job and gets out of the way really quickly. It helps us deal with incidents when they happen.

In addition, the targeted notifications have helped reduce response times to IT incidents. It doesn't require a person in the operations center to call five people five times. It handles things synchronously. I would absolutely posit that our response time is quicker than it used to be.

In terms of its flexibility, we've been using it for close to two years, and we have yet to encounter a situation where somebody hasn't been enabled to configure it to work the way we want. We can configure groups to be members of other groups, enabling us to nest sequences of rosters, and that has been super-helpful in a number of scenarios. We provided a little bit of training and a little bit of documentation for the managers who had to manage their rosters and the sequence of calls, and since then, we really haven't had to do a lot, other than some reminders. But we just tell them the URL and that they should log in. They can figure it out from there. The UI is understandable. It's fairly straightforward to understand how you add a user or add a member to the roster or add a device. It doesn't take a lot of administrative overhead and that's important for us. We don't have a lot of people to manage every little thing, so people being able to do it themselves is pretty important.

And because we use it primarily for our major incident response and automated on-call processes, the automatic logging that's built into xMatters, especially the timeline of events, is very helpful because we can figure out why a particular person got a call. We can see, for instance, that it was because an incident showed up in that person's group and it went to the first person on-call and that person hit skip or ignore. It then went to the next person, called all of their devices, but they never acknowledged anything. Then it went to the next person and that's who actually picked up. Having that level of detail built-in makes it really easy for me or the managers to prove that's what happened, and we can self-serve that information. It gives people the autonomy to know why they got a call. Just click here and you'll see exactly why the fourth person in the roster got the call instead of the first.

The integration of xMatters with ServiceNow worked pretty easily. There was a little bit of configuration and coordination with our ServiceNow, but once it was set up it just worked. It does the right thing for us. We don't want every single instance that ServiceNow handles to generate an on-call notification. We only want priority-one and priority-two to result in notifications, for certain groups, via xMatters. It does that really well. That integration part was super-easy. I have also done some work with the xMatters API to pull out information about users and groups and rosters into a Google sheet. I used a Google Apps Script to interact with xMatters and pull information out for reporting purposes. That was also really easy. We use that information to see how many people are in xMatters, who's licensed, and if people have left the university we can make sure we kill off their accounts.

xMatters has also helped us build workflows that meet our needs. In comparison to all of the organizations that use xMatters, our workflows are not complex, but it does what it does well and easily. Our simple workflows consist of an incident coming in and the right group being contacted. Within that group it goes through the sequence of people in the roster, in the right order. That was super-easy to set up. It was also very easy to set up another simple workflow where we use Zoom and Google Meet for our bridge process. If somebody isn't sure about something that is going on they can send out a "Please jump on the bridge line real quick" message. We can use either the xMatters bridge or the Zoom or Google Meet bridges that we have set up. That helps us control access and costs because we're already using Zoom and Google.

We would like to see a greater variety of integrations with ServiceNow. It works fine as it is, but an enhancement would be the ability to interact with the major incident module in ServiceNow. In ServiceNow, you can create an incident which is priority-1, 2, 3 or 4. The existing xMatters integration allows you to filter on just P1s and P2s, or on all priorities, or on just select ones. The way our major incident process works, when an incident is elevated from a P1 to a major incident, that is an extra flag in ServiceNow. It would be awesome to have xMatters get notification when something goes from a P1 to a major and then have it go through a different workflow, rather than our regular P1. 

We purchased it in the latter half of 2019, so we've been using xMatters IT Management for about two years.

The stability has been great. I can't think of a time in the last two years that it's been down when we've needed it. They've done upgrades, but I can't remember it ever being down.

The pricing was good, from our perspective, for scaling. It hits the mark. If we had to add hundreds of users we'd take a look at what kinds of bulk discount rates they may have.

As far as the technology goes, it seems to me that scaling is pretty easy to manage. You start with the ability to put groups inside of groups and have nested rosters. There are workflows that are specific to groups or to particular processes and that makes it fairly easy to configure. I would expect it to be a pretty scalable solution if we decided to roll it out in a significant way.

Currently, we have 105 people licensed, and 102 of them are in central IT. The other three are in the police department. Everybody in IT who is licensed is an active user because they are on-call in whatever rotation has been defined.

It's yet to be decided if we will increase our usage. In higher education there have been some budget cuts and position losses. It's always a moving target regarding whether we're going to expand or contract. At this point, I don't think we'll expand the use of xMatters because we've already licensed it to everybody in IT who needs to be licensed. If we had to roll it out to other departments around the university, I don't see it being an issue. But we are a heavily centralized IT operation here. We don't have a lot of distributed IT infrastructure or staff. Pretty much everything has to flow through IT.

Their support is quick. They literally react within minutes, at times, after you put a ticket in. They've been great with any support issue we have had. That was especially true early on. We haven't had one in a while, but when we had questions that weren't bugs but just our not understanding something, they were getting back to us within minutes.

Positive

We did not have something that was similar to xMatters. What we had was an old-fashioned analog method of on-call management, in which people would share a cell phone. The cell phone would be handed from person to person as they went off-call. We had staff who sat in our operations center, 24/7/365. They had the list of phone numbers in a document on their machines that gave them the cell phone numbers to call for each group. So there was a system, but it wasn't a modern solution.

We did a couple of walkthrough training sessions with xMatters staff. It involved a core group from our side, people who were going to be the admins or the main people using and configuring xMatters. I then did a handful of walkthroughs with different groups in our IT department. Those were about 45 minutes to an hour in length and I showed them the interface and how to add their devices. We did a little bit of documentation, but not much, about our process as it relates to xMatters. We then rolled it out. We did all of the training within a few weeks, once we got close to that "lights out"  deadline at the end of December of 2019.

In terms of our infrastructure, we just added the module for ServiceNow, filled in some details according to the documentation, and hit save. That was it.

As for maintenance, the only thing we've had to do is add users and remove users. It's a set-it-and-forget-it solution.

There have been savings in process and overhead that we have been able to realize. We no longer need to have our staff looking at a screen overnight, on weekends, and during the day, every day of the year. We repurposed those staff members to work of higher value.

It's billed per user license.

The way we approached it was to look at who actually needed to be on-call and licensed people accordingly. The pricing is tiered so we took that into account. If we were to license 10 or 20 people, that would be a certain price. And if we were to license 50 or 100, there would be a little bit of discounting. But the per-user license was right in line with what we were expecting.

We looked at PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and VictorOps. We considered all of them and looked at some demos, but we didn't get as far as doing a full proof of concept. The main reason we ended up going with xMatters was that it seemed that a lot of the alternatives I mentioned were built on the premise of being the actual incident management tool, and not just an on-call management tool. We were very clear that we needed a tool to do on-call management, and that ServiceNow was going to be our incident management tool. We just needed something to bring people together by notifying their mobile devices or by making a phone call to alert them in the middle of the night. xMatters fit that perfectly.

I don't think I've ever had a complaint about it. xMatters just works.

We have 3 XM instances and have integration between the below environments:

• XM- BMC ITSM for Incident Management
• XM- BMC ITSM for Incident Management 
• XM- BMC ITSM for Change Management
• XM- Service Cloud
• XM -XM instances

All the instances are a combination of on-premises and SaaS services.

The primary role is to notify the appropriate resource which reduces the time to notify and further reduces the time to resolution and overall MTTR.

When a Sev-1 is generated, the alert gets generated to the appropriate support group which leads to contacting the right SME to initiate the MTTR process.

The initial stage of identifying the right SME was a challenge. This led us to delay notifying the right SME and start working upon the restoration of service.

After implementing the solution and updating the groups/on-call list we have seen a huge volume of increase in the Time of React. This helps us to alert the right resources within a fraction of seconds (after the alert is generated) which allows for quick notification and a faster restoration process.

The request also gets assigned to the resource which avoids SLA breaches.

There are multiple features within this product that help, including:

1- Integration between multiple products (makes it easy to notify the alert)

2- Seamless process of on-boarding resources on the XM platform

3- Groups creation and resource mapping to the appropriate groups

4- Easy steps to set up the on-call schedule

5- The on-call list includes an auto-rotation feature which helps us to avoid visiting the app to change the on-call list week by week

6- Simple features create flow sets and build APIs for integrations

7- Reporting that helps to get the right volume of alerts

8- Dashboards that help to view the status of the alerts

9- Logs in the alert also help to identify the details and root cause

1- Duplicating the Groups

2- Weekly/monthly notifications to the admin on the licenses consumed vs available

3- Bulk update of groups

4- Early product enhancements should be added in the next sprint/release

5- An additional knowledge-sharing program could be helpful and part of the demo workshops (right now, these only provide partial information)

6- Identify real-time issues and have OOTB templates related to use cases

7- BEing able to update the same event, rather than creating a new one which would avoid confusion on multiple events created for the same alert

I've used the solution for 4 or more years.

As of now, we haven't had any downtime - the app being a SaaS platform. It clearly mentions the Infra and the service provided is 100%.

We did not use a different solution previously.

We would advise new users to reach out to the XM sales teams for a better quote.

We did not evaluate other options. 

We're not using it for the rota aspect. We specifically use it to send communication out to the business and also to arrange calls at the bridge where people can join the bridge. We have integrated it with other applications that we use heavily, such as Workplace by Facebook and Slack. Once we've sent out our communications via xMatters, it sends an email and text message to users or the intended people who are supposed to receive the message. That message is also posted on Slack and Workplace.

It is an efficient way to deliver communication to a large number of users across a number of different applications. It has helped in getting the right information out to the right people on time. We are able to ensure that they all received the information in a timely manner. 

It is helpful for us in getting the communication out to multiple users on different platforms in a timely manner. It brings ease of use in terms of us inputting information only into one system, as opposed to three or four different locations, and that includes being able to contact people. If we need to have everyone on a call, it is easy to open a bridge, and the relevant people would receive a phone call who can join automatically through the bridge.

Workflows and messaging are most valuable. Workflows are very useful. They are important for consolidating information or stopping duplication from happening. We put all the information into xMatters and then the workflow will push the same information in the correct format directly through to other applications that our end users frequently use, such as Slack, email, and Workplace. 

The other main part that we use is messaging. We use it for our major incident communications and our change freeze communications. We also run our testing through there. So, when we're doing test incident communications, we run those as well through xMatters.

We have integrated it with other tools such as Slack and Workplace. It is straightforward to integrate, but the first couple of times, you do need a level of understanding in terms of what you're doing. However, it is not difficult to get that information. There is lots of information held on xMatters knowledge base itself, which is very useful. There is always someone else who has implemented the solution that you are looking for. You can pretty much find anything you need within xMatters. There have only been a couple of instances where we haven't been able to find a solution. In such cases, we contact our account manager, who is very helpful. They help us with any particular difficulty that we're having, but once you are familiar with the workflow builder and how it works, it is very easy and straightforward to create new workflows and integrations.

One of the main reasons why we don't use xMatters for monitoring and alerting is that it doesn't use the rota to call the person who's on-call. It doesn't look up the rota to find out who's on-call and then contacts that person directly. I am not sure if this has changed now, but the last time we checked, this functionality wasn't there. This is one of the main improvements. We're happy with the rest of it.

I've been here for three years now, and it has been used for longer than that.

Its stability is excellent. I've never had a situation where xMatters has gone down at all. I never look at it as a tool about which I'm concerned that it may not work. I'm always able to get access to it. Whenever we needed it, we were always able to get the communication out. It is very reliable.

It is definitely scalable. We have our incident communication that goes out, and we also use it for our business continuity, which is specifically set up for emergency purposes where we are able to send text messages out to the entire company. In terms of scalability, it is highly scalable. It is nice because you can tailor it to your own specific requirements even as they change. The one main thing for us would be the scheduling part of it so that if there was an incident, it contacts the right on-call person. However, our technical teams use PagerDuty for that. In our team specifically, which is the service delivery department, we use xMatters to notify of major incidents.

On our side, it is my team, which is the service delivery team. There are four of us, and then there is the services team as well. So, the services team uses xMatters for business continuity, which is to notify people. For example, in a fire emergency, everyone has to leave the building. So, there are two specific teams that use xMatters: the services team and the service delivery team.

I've never had a problem with xMatters, per se. The only thing for which we contact xMatters is if we're trying to set something up specifically that we cannot find through a knowledge base article. The response is great, and we always get to where we need to be. We always end up implementing the solution that we set out, so we always achieve what we wanted to. So, they provide great support. On a scale of one to 10, I would definitely rate them a 10.

PagerDuty is probably the only other solution that I have used. xMatters tops PagerDuty in terms of ease of use for sending out communication to the business. I like the workflows and the layout of xMatters. It is very easy to use. PagerDuty isn't so user-friendly. The only thing that is better in PagerDuty than xMatters is the scheduling.

I wasn't involved with setting it up from scratch. I've set up new workflows for which you obviously need your users and groups and then you create your workflow with whoever you want to send it to. It's relatively easy. As long as you follow the initial user guide and you have a clear understanding of what you're trying to achieve, you can set up some of the basic functionality easily in order to get going by yourself. The rest is all available in xMatters' knowledge base.

It doesn't require any maintenance. There isn't any maintenance on our side. It's all cloud-based, and we just log in and carry on using it. xMatters does regular updates, and they notify us when there is an update, which is often quite useful. That's it.

I don't make the decisions on the cost aspect. We haven't had any complaints. I think it has a reasonable price. 

My advice would be to have an idea in mind of what exactly you are looking for. You should look at the different ways that other businesses use incident communications because a lot of companies may not think of certain solutions that others are using. So, rather than evaluating the product based on what it can do, it's always useful to see how other businesses are already using it. That's most helpful in my opinion.

Its logging capability is very straightforward to use. It is not difficult, and it is very informative. From the information contained within the logs, it is not difficult to find out where the failure occurred. We don't use xMatters logs as part of our operations. We only use logs to find out if we've implemented something that doesn't work, or when something breaks and we're trying to figure out where exactly it has gone wrong. They come in handy when we are trying to figure out where something has gone wrong, or when specific people have run certain tests, they are used to see which messages were sent and when. So, mainly, we use logs when there is an issue in xMatters, and we need to figure out where it failed.

We don't use call scheduling and rota aspects of xMatters. We also don't use coding to expand the flexibility or functionality of xMatters workflows. We used to have to do some coding, but once there was the introduction of the workflows, it kind of eliminated that side of it, so we didn't need that any longer.

xMatters workflows haven't helped us to address issues proactively. That's because we don't use it in that way. We don't use it for monitoring. It is only for alerting but not in terms of incident management or our teams being alerted of an incident. It is only in terms of alerting staff members of an issue or an incident. So, within our setup, we don't use xMatters for monitoring.

I would rate xMatters IT Management an eight out of 10.

We have three instances of xMatters. One is for customer support, one is for our internal IT, and the third, that we recently procured, is the SaaS version.

We have integrated two of our xMatters instances, the IT instance for ITSM incident management, and the SaaS version. We also recently worked on integrating customer support between xMatters and both instances, so that xMatters can be triggered from the SaaS instance and there will be a notification in the customer support instance. And vice versa: An alert from customer support will reach out to the on-call in the SaaS instance. And now we are working on integrating xMatters with change management and SaaS. In addition, we integrated xMatters with Salesforce.

At one time I was working in our global network operations center. We had a few difficulties in reaching out to the on-call resource. I would call someone only for that person to say, "Okay, I'm not on-call this week. You should call this person," and that person's number was unreachable. Then I would have to call the first person again and he would say, "Okay, now call this person," and he might also not be the right person. It was a time-consuming process and there was a delay in dealing with the service disruption. Implementing xMatters has helped us to identify who the on-call person is, and the built-in escalation really helps.

Managers can also get an idea of which on-call resources acknowledged an alert, and whether it was escalated to the next level or the third level.

Also, the targeted, content-rich notifications have helped to reduce response times, although we haven't measured by how much.

We have only integrated our Sev-1 incidences. Once a Sev-1 is generated, an xMatters alert is automatically triggered and the on-call person acknowledges the event. With that acknowledegment, the incident's status is changed to "in progress." As a result, responses to incidents are at 100 percent. We also have a checkpoint. When there is an event, a NOC engineer reaches out, every 15 minutes, to the person who has acknowledged the event, about whether there is a service disruption or not. With the quick responses to alerts, we have time to figure out what our outage notification or disruption message will be to our end customers. All of this definitely helps us to reduce the communication involved, as well as expedite the restoration of service. 

xMatters is helpful for getting the right on-call resources. That is a key factor. It is also very user-friendly, and just a little documentation helps you to understand things such as how on-calls are configured, how groups are configured, and how users update their on-call devices.

We're also able to specify messages for the different channels, such as text messages, voicemail, or email. That is quite helpful for us.

In addition, xMatters' reporting capabilities help managers to identify the peers and escalation that we have configured. It helps them see how many times an on-call either did not receive an alert or escalated it.

Another key feature set that xMatters offers is the API calls through which you can trigger xMatters. Because every application has its API, we just have to set up small workflows.

We also use xMatters logs on a daily basis. All incidents are created in ITSM and the logging capabilities are easy to use. We have integrated our xMatters with Okta. As a result, the authentication process takes care of the username and password. We haven't provided our users a bypass link so that they can directly log in to xMatters. Users have to log in using their Okta authentications.

With xMatters we have the flexibility to grant permissions to managers so that they can update their on-call schedules. They can change who is available in the next week, who is on the roster, et cetera. Managers can decide which person will be working on which shift. Some of our teams work 24/7, some work 24/5, and a few of our teams work 18/5. Managing all of them is a tough job and we addressed it by having the managers update their own on-call lists.

We have integrated two different xMatters instances. When something triggers in xMatters, we get a message in that instance about who responded, the device type, et cetera. But if we try to trigger it to a different instance, we don't get that kind of information. For that scenario we have built a workaround to get the details of the event, and that we have received a response for it. That's one of the major things that could be improved.

Another issue is related to the reporting. We have to know what keyword to search for. When we type something in, we get a few suggestions. If the suggestions are not enough, we need to go back to the specific event message and look at the actual event, and learn what needs to be updated based on that. We get that information from the Properties tab.

Thirdly, we have to create an Excel sheet for onboarding users and then upload it. But if an employee resigns, we don't have any checkpoints to validate whether the user is still active or not. We have to do that manually every week: Check who has left the organization, and do a cross-check on whether that person had any licenses or signed in to xMatters. If so, we have to make that profile inactive for a month and then release the license.

Finally, I get regular updates on the new features that are being released by xMatters. If they could provide a short presentation or video on these new features, and how we can leverage them based on our use case, that would really help.

We initially procured xMatters back in 2017 or 2018. We were looking to share these kinds of ideas with our internal and external customers who use xMatters, as well as ITSM.

xMatters is stable.

I only recollect once that we needed some maintenance, but that was also part of the 99 percent availability. The maintenance was done with zero downtime. I don't recall that we have had to do any maintenance on xMatters.

In terms of scalability, I'm managing two different instances of xMatters and someone else is taking care of the customer support instance. I believe that instance has 9,000 licenses. For IT we recently purchased 30 more so now we now have 180, and for our SaaS instance there are 200.

Whether we will increase our usage of xMatters will depend on how our business develops.

The technical support team is really helpful. They know what we are asking and what we are looking for. They don't work by saying "Step one, step two, step three." Whenever we submit a ticket, even if it is a P3 or P4, we immediately get an acknowledegment that they are reviewing our request and that they will get back to us. It's not like, "Okay, it's P4, let's respond after two or three days." Overall, their tech support has really helped us. And if the requirements or the scope go beyond their capabilities, they will involve our customer relationship manager. Once he is in the picture, if required, he will tell us we need to involve professional services.

But so far, there has not been an issue that a support person was unable to resolve for us. Some of the time there has been some back-and-forth communication, but in the end, we have been provided with a resolution.

Positive

Before xMatters we had a small portal where people could update their mobile numbers, whereas the ITSM product contained the on-call list. Managers would go there to update that list. But it was not being maintained properly and we had a tough time reaching the actual on-call person. With our first priority being to return our service back to available when there is a disruption, we got to know xMatters and replaced the old system.

As this was a new application for us, we were not aware of what might need to be done. The professional services team was engaged at some point and, through them, we got a few ideas about how this would help us, how we could integrate it, how the user profiles are built, how the groups are created, et cetera. 

The process of integrating xMatters with other applications was not too difficult. We already have the GIT files readily available, so it was just a matter of updating the scripts, connecting the dots, and it was really helpful in building the workflows.

The issue that is impacting things is the licensing. The features are really good. The solution really helps us to find the appropriate person, per issue, and to resolve each one as soon as possible. But what makes things difficult is the licensing. We have to manage the number of users we onboard, and we need a buffer of 10 or 20 licenses because in an emergency or crisis situation, we might need all those buffer licenses.

Still, we have definitely seen cost savings when we are restoring a service disruption. When a Sev-1 is initiated, xMatters is triggered and calls the right person and he acknowledges. On a weekly basis it saves us between $100 and $200.

Every customer would like a free ride, of course, and being a customer, I definitely feel the pricing is too high.

A caveat here is that initially we procured 150 licenses and we have almost 1,500 users in IT. We had to come up with a few ideas for determining which users get a license and which users don't need one. Due to the limitation of the number of licenses, we were unable to integrate the user profiles with Active Directory. 

Also, having that many licenses versus that many employees won't help us. It would be good if there was a feature where we could trigger all the users we need in a single go. That would really help in a crisis situation.

We didn't evaluate any other options. When we had the xMatters demo and we felt that it was the right product for us. The integration ability was the main aspect, as were the user profiles, the on-call list, and the delivery channels for messages. All of those really helped in our decision to purchase the xMatters solution.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using xMatters is that end-users have to manage their own profiles and know their availability for the on-call schedule. Also, if someone is not available to be on-call, the absence/replacement feature in xMatters really helps. The replacement enables us to know who is replacing whom, from when to when, and from which team. And with the recent launch of workflows, we can build our own workflows. I reviewed a few videos on integrating Teams or Skype with xMatters and that looks like a key feature.

The documentation from xMatters, in general, is very clear and the support is very helpful.

I use xMatters on a day-to-day basis. I have an eye on all three instances we have. I know which user is replaced by which user. And whenever the support team reaches out to me saying, "This event was triggered to me, but it should not have been triggered to me," we have all the logs to help us identify why that event was triggered to that person or why it didn't trigger to a given person. If we need any more help, again, the support team is there. We just submit a request and we get assistance. 

It has been a good journey over the last three years, getting more details about, and insights into, the product. It really helps us.

We use AWS CloudWatch to monitor our infrastructure, and when CloudWatch detects an anomaly, it sends an alarm to xMatters, which triggers a workflow. Depending on what the alarm is, the workflow will either try to remediate it automatically, e.g if it's the server running out of disc space, or it will look at our online dashboard to see if the affected server is in a maintenance window. If it is, it doesn't do anything else, because an alarm would be expected during a maintenance window. If it's not in any maintenance window, then it generates an instant on the dashboard so that our customers can see that the system's affected, and then it generates an xMatters alert for the on-call team, and then xMatters takes care of notifying whoever is currently on call that there's a problem to be investigated.

We recently released a software as a service platform and that required us to provide 24/7 support, something the company's never done before. I'd previously been using xMatters just within IT to monitor the systems for us, but not really for alerting us. For this service, we said, okay. We have a team doing UK hours during the week, the team doing US hours during the week, the team doing Asia hours during the week, and then we have the four-weekend teams that it rotates through. So there's that complexity that it handles for us. We've got monitoring of the systems, again, with CloudWatch, but then feeding into xMatters to alert who's on call. It then notifies the Slack channel for everyone so that you can see that something happened. Plus we've also got it tied in with JIRA service desk, so that if a customer puts in a high priority ticket, one that has to be dealt with within four hours, that raises an xMatters incident so that the on-call staff knows that they've got to deal with it very quickly. We just would not have been able to do that if we didn't know about xMatters. 

xMatters helped to automate our incident notification processes. If CloudWatch tells us that something's gone wrong, the workflow sets up an incident within xMatters and we've got it set so that it notifies the people on call. It also notifies the management team just so that they're aware that something's happened. Within xMatters, there's an incident template so that you can use that to record the steps that you take to deal with the incident so that when it's all dealt with afterward, you have everything in one place to create a post-mortem report from.

This automation of incident notification processes has immensely affected our ability to respond to incidents. It means that we can be on call on a weekend, but actually not have to sit in front of a computer all the time watching for things all the time. We can just go about, relatively speaking, our normal weekend lives, and when the phone goes off with an alert, then we know we've got an incident to deal with. It sets up a Slack channel specifically for that incident so that any chatter around what's gone wrong and how to deal with it is kept in one place and not in the middle of the general conversation, and that's all done automatically.

It has absolutely helped build workflows that meet our needs. I've looked at other platforms and I don't think I've come across anything else that allows you to write code to actually execute within the workflow, and that has absolutely 100% solved problems that we really need to deal with. These workflows also helped to address issues proactively. The classic one is the workflow to deal with the server running at disk space. So, we have it set up so that if the amount of free space falls below 15%, then it triggers the alarm and the alarm triggers the workflow, and the workflow doubles the space, and that is proactive. It handles this situation before the server actually runs out of space and that's helped us a lot as well.

We use the coding to expand the flexibility. The disk expansion one is 100% JavaScript that I've written. There are no xMatters bits in there at all. It's all written by me and actually the benefit there was that xMatters themselves don't have any support for calling AWS APIs, and so I actually had to work out how to do that. AWS APIs are quite funky around signed headers and stuff like that. That took quite a bit of doing, but it's something I've now made open source so anyone else who wants to call the APIs for xMatters, it's all there for them to get on with.

The fact that we can have different teams being assigned different areas of responsibility means that if an alarm goes off, you target the specific group for that responsibility. So, it means you're getting the right person at the right time.

One of the things that really attracted me is in workflows, you can write your own custom steps in JavaScript. You are not restricted to the steps that they provide. If you can write it in JavaScript, you can pretty much do anything. It gives me flexibility in ways that other platforms don't. For example, the online dashboard system we use is not a widely used one, but they have an API. So, I'm able to write the JavaScript steps to do things like check if a system's in the maintenance window or create an instant on the dashboard or change the status of an instant. I'm not dependent on the dashboard provider or xMatters creating steps for me.

It's very flexible. The intuitiveness of it is not great. It can be a little bit challenging to achieve all of the combinations and permutations you might want. I've had to build it out a little bit. It's not simple, but it's powerful enough that I can do it.

We have integrated xMatters with CloudWatch and the dashboard. We've actually got two different dashboards depending on which platform we're monitoring. I've integrated with that, I've integrated with Slack, I've integrated it with Google Chat. It's really easy to integrate it with third-party products.

They have a very strong selection of third-party integrations that they support. Out-of-the-box, Slack's there, Teams is there, Zoom is there if you want to set up a video call for an incident. You've got third-party platforms for data management, but even if they don't have something out-of-the-box, so long as the product you're trying to integrate with has an API and you are fairly conversant in JavaScript, you can do it yourself. It's that good.

We also use REST API. It's really strong at helping to customize processes and information. The only shortcoming I would identify is that when they're rolling out new features, the REST API can take a release or two to catch up, and that's because they'll be firming up on what the functionality is of the feature before allowing you to then start accessing it via the API. Initially, it's only handled by built-in steps. The Rest API is really powerful.

As an agent, as someone who is on call, I can mark an absence time and I can optionally put somebody in my place, but once you've done that, you can't edit it. You have to delete it and create a new absence, which is annoying, but it's not a massive issue. It's a minor annoyance. That's probably about the only thing I can come up with because I absolutely love the product. It's met our needs so well.

I have been using xMatters for two to three years. 

It's very stable. They do quarterly releases of new features. We've never had an outage on xMatters at all. It's rock-solid from our perspective.

It's really scalable. I don't think they give much away about how it's running behind the scenes, but they don't seem to place any constraints on how many workflows you have, what you do in the workflows, how many agents you have since you pay for them, that sort of thing. I don't remember any limitations that they announced.

We're paying for 15 users at the moment. Most of them are support agents for the SaaS product.

The staff for xMatters is brilliant. When we first started using xMatters we were on their free plan.

The great thing about their free plan is that it only really constrains you to the number of agents you can have using it. There are no constraints on workflows or anything like that, which is unlike other products that might have a free version they normally put limits in. With xMatters, it's only the number of users, but even there, you can get full technical support from them. When I first started writing my own steps in the workflows, not only do they help you, but they encourage you. You get really positive feedback from them and that helps you to feel positive about the changes you're making.

Positive

I have experience with Atlassian. The intuitiveness becomes a trade-off. I think that if a system offers a simple level of managing who's on call and things like that, then it is more intuitive to use, but you are constrained by that simplicity, and this is what I was saying about xMatters. It's a really powerful platform. You can do a lot with it, but that means that they have this challenge of how do they make it more intuitive to achieve certain aspects.

Initially, we were using it at zero cost and it was 100% meeting our needs, and I can't say fairer than that. And then when I was asked by the department that was setting up this SaaS product what I would suggest. I said use what I'm using. It will 100% meet your needs and I've got the experience of using it. We didn't even look any further because we knew we had a product that would do what we needed it to do.

I think it is excellent value for money. I can't remember what we're paying now, but the per agent cost is extremely reasonable for what the platform does. It's entirely agnostic of where you are getting your alarms from. You could even trigger an alarm by email if you want. It's that open to what triggers an event. 

I looked at Opsgenie briefly, which was acquired by Atlassian, and I didn't get on with that as well.

I evaluated it separately and before xMatters. I was looking for a solution. We are quite an Atlassian user. We used quite a few of their products, so that's why I looked at Opsgenie first, but ultimately didn't feel that it was a good fit for what we were needing, so I gave up on it and didn't think about much else. Then I came across xMatters at a conference. They told me about the free offering and all of that good stuff and I thought that there was nothing to lose in trying this one and it just went from there.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It's not perfect, but it's really damn close to it.

My advice would be to give it a try. It literally costs nothing to try it and there are a lot of integrations that you can easily add that xMatters provides. You don't have to do coding. You don't have to know JavaScript. It's really easy to put the steps onto a workflow and join them together. If you check for results and branch off to do different things depending on what the results are, there's basically a lot you can do without having to do any coding, but if you're comfortable with JavaScript, then the sky's the limit. You can really go for it.