Everbridge IT Alerting Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We evaluated xMatters as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

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

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

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

We use 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.

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.

For IT alerting, we are using it for incident management for severity 1 and 2 type call-outs. We are using the calendar for on-call rotations, and we have configured call trees within the calendar to page out based on system and business impacts. 

We have been able to use it to track and verify that people are on the bridge. It has also made it much easier when you have one touch to join the bridge, and we have been tracking our resolution time, which is now shorter. This is partly because of Everbridge and it being easier to get people on the phone. Also, we are able to escalate and track resources throughout the incident process.

They have improved our ability to be flexible in the way that we are setting up our calendar and structure. We can use it for individual call-outs versus an incident versus being able to run a test, etc. 

You can build consistent templates. They give you a couple of different phone numbers, so if you have more than one incident (which we have had), you can page out to different people and have people run different call bridges from that point. 

The other thing that I personally like is the flexibility that we have to do updates four times a day. We do not just do it once a day or once a week. We do it four times a day. If somebody changes their phone number in the middle of the day, we will pick it up and be able to make sure if they are on call that night that we can call the right number. This configuration has been good for us.

The ability to not have to worry about the IT alerting and calendar resources. I would like it to be simpler in the sense of a different cost structure. 

I would like to see: When employees move locations, how does it correct in the system (Everbridge) versus PeopleSoft (which we also run)? I need to check on this functionality.

We have never had any issues with stability. 

From a functionality standpoint, we have been able to go in there, run things, and do things. We have had great success. We have written a white paper about the fact that we had 49 people trapped in Puerto Rico with the hurricanes. We have used it for more than 500 different notifications, tests, etc. I think the way it is configured and setup has been fairly successful.

We are growing with mergers. We have added approximately 500 people over the year. We are merging with some other divisions and had no problems with scalability. We have consistently grown under PeopleSoft.

My biggest compliment is we have great account management people that help us out. We have been able to turn the tool over to IT people that have never used it, and they have been able to run it with minimal help or support. 

We still work with our implementation manager, who has been extremely effective, very consistent, and spot on. I have opened up about 10 tickets with approximately seven of them being very positive with quick turnaround, the support being knowledgeable, and knowing the answer. In maybe just one instance, a person did not listen very well, then I ended up calling our implementation manager. 

We did have a previous solution, but they were bought out. I used this solution for a couple of years.

Since I have already done the setup with our competitor, I pretty much understood the project.

We hired Everbridge to be on site for three days. This was very helpful, because of our resources were strained. We got Everbridge in a room and the project got done, versus trying to string it along. Therefore, I thought the implementation was actually good. 

The implementation was simple. They have Everbridge University online. They have videos and a help desk which will be able to help you if you choose. They have multiple ways to get you to the place where you are looking to be.   

They are one of the top three most expensive products. I also understand if you are going to use them for IT alerting, it is worth it. They are competitively priced, but the IT alerting is the differentiator. The way that they market it and push it out. That is their premier function. 

Their call structure is based on how many people are IT alert people and who is on the calendar, and the cost will be driven by those numbers versus if you are using it for the non-IT alert. As you look at the competition and other vendors, make sure you truly understand your cost structure with them.

When we did our contract, we did a three year contract with fixed pricing. We locked in the pricing for three years. As we have grown, we locked in pricing for additional units of employees. 

We went through about an 18 month RFP process. We issued it to 10 different organizations. We narrowed it down to the top three. We did demos and brought in our senior IT people to participate in the demos from that point.

There are only one or two companies that can even come close to the detail requirements of IT alerting, like Send Word Now and Text Matters, their systems do not come close. They are cheap knock offs. We did demos with them, priced them out, and while they were cheaper, they did not have the scalability and quality that we were looking for, and that is why we eliminated them. 

We also evaluated xMatters.

• Continue to do detailed RFP requirements.
• Know how to differentiate solutions and what you are buying. 
• Demo it and make sure that it meets your requirements and integrate it with your tools and systems. 

If you buy it and don't install it (or you don't install it right then), you are wasting your money. I am assuming that if you are going to invest a couple thousand dollars a year, easily, if not more depending on the size of the organization. 

The tool does not change the process. It facilitates the process. Don't expect the tool to solve the business process. 

They truly take security very seriously on passwords and make you change it frequently. 

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

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

Our use case was essentially incident notification.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The deployment took about two months.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.