Everbridge IT Alerting Reviews

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

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

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

It's not easy to add on extra capabilities.

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

I have two people for deployment.

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

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

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

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

We are most probably using its most recent version.

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

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

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

We've been using it for about five years.

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

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

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

It was pretty straightforward.

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

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

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

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

I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could see how it would scale up very easily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alerts from our monitoring system to hit on-call and our help desk to create on-call bridges.

We have been somewhat able to quantify the benefits. Users like the ease of use via the mobile app. Also, the simplicity of the on-call process is encouraging stakeholders to use the product rather than to try to call someone directly.

• System availability
• SaaS solution, so no infrastructure
• Mobile app

Powerful conference bridging that rigorously reaches out to stakeholders, which saves time working an issue. The mobile app provides ease of use for our resolvers and mobile push has proven quick and reliable. It also gives us flexibility around creating sometimes complex shifts within an on-call calendar.

One thing that could be improved would be to enable the mobile app to more easily display published calendars via the Member Portal. Currently, it is quite difficult.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Tech support is excellent; very responsive and they provide good follow-up.

We did use another product previously and we switched because Everbridge met our requirements. In addition, our Global Security team was using the Everbridge Mass Notification product, so going with it created synergy.

We selected Everbridge through a PoC process performed early in 2017.

The initial setup was very fast with the controller coming online almost right away. The implementation team assisted us in onboarding our users and calendars. The complex part has been in transitioning our user community to the new system.

Get a clear idea of the number of users (those that manage calendars and/or initiate incidents) and use SSO which greatly facilitates adoption.

xMatters.

Any new system will create adoption challenges, especially if you are migrating off another platform. Emphasize the benefits of moving to it (SaaS, the mobile app, ease of use, system stability) and be sure to conduct both formal training and close follow-up with users.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IT incident management.

It's now a little quicker to get folks together on a bridge. It has enabled us to have quicker times to resolution.

The ability for people to be able to join a bridge with one press of a button. It gives us the ability to contact the correct people via rules, based on conditions. 

The ability for members to change their schedules, and change the person they're swapping with, could use improvement. For two people to swap, both people have to log in, as you can only update your own schedule with a member account.

Suppose I am swapping with Bill for the day because he is sick. It makes no sense that both he and I each have to update the schedule. He has to go in and put me as a replacement for him. Then, the day he is taking for me, I have to go in and put him as my replacement.

It's pretty stable.

It's scalable.

The tech support is great. They're almost always able to solve my issues pretty quickly.

The initial setup was probably somewhere in the middle, between straightforward and complex. I think the some of the harder parts were the importing of all the data.

Definitely use the rules and conditions so you can contact the right people for different outages. The GUI is a little tough to navigate. It's not very straightforward when someone is trying to change schedules.

It's very accurate and, once you get to know it, you can make it meet your needs.

Escalation and incident management.

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

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

• Incident management
• Ease of integrations

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

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Technical support is helpful.

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

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

Pricing is reasonable, based on different customer types.

PagerDuty.

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