We use it for IT alerting. It is used to alert our monitoring solutions to call out on-call support. That's the primary use case for which we've had it here for a number of years. We also use it for major incident communication to subscribers.
It used to be on-premises, but we migrated to their SaaS product five years ago.
For our major incident management, it has expanded what we can do in terms of the format of the communication. People can subscribe, and they can receive delivery on multiple platforms, whether it's a voice message, email, or mobile app message. It enables us to deliver the right communication to the right people in the format they want.
We've integrated it with the Interlink software event management solution. Just recently, we have integrated it with Microsoft Teams, and we've also integrated it with a number of internal IT operations systems.
They have made massive improvements over the last few years in terms of integration. Previously, we would've had to engage xMatters formally to get an integration built, but now, they just appear out of the box. The integration possibilities that xMatters offers are very good. There are a lot of integrations that are built within the applications and are just plug and play, which is massively beneficial for us. xMatters can easily integrate with the main IT operations solutions provided by the key vendors in the IT operations world, such as Splunk, Slack, and Microsoft solutions. It has got out-of-the-box integrations to all of those.
xMatters is very good at quickly rolling out out-of-the-box integrations for new software, which has enabled us to onboard applications quicker than before. Every six months, a new application comes out that trumps the previous one. They have been very good at being proactive themselves and making sure that they are on top of the market. They're very good at understanding what the key applications are and making sure that they have integrations built for those.
We use xMatters’ REST API. It is very easy to use. Utilizing xMatters' REST API makes things a lot slicker and a lot simpler.
It has helped us to automate our incident notification process via subscription. We've been able to integrate it with our incident reports. From those incident reports, we can ping a request into xMatters to create a notification that can then be automatically sent out to subscribers.
It quickly gets the communication out to a targeted set of users. So, we're not spamming people. By getting the messages out, people can engage with us if needed. They can read valid updates, and if they need to engage with us, they can engage quickly.
It has helped us to build workflows that meet our needs. I've taken a step away for a few months to understand exactly how any of that works, but we've been able to build workflows for our organization with minimal help from xMatters' technical services.
It requires minimal coding. The benefit of xMatters is that you don't need to do so much coding. A lot of their integrations are out of the box. We have made use of coding, but the amount of coding we need to do to build successful integrations and workflows has reduced significantly, which is a positive thing.
We made use of coding when we needed major-incident management communication, specifically for our cloud providers. We had to build workflows specifically to notify people about issues with cloud services. So, we had to do some custom coding to alert our internal cloud consumers.
The expanded flexibility or functionality due to coding workflows has affected our operations in a positive way. It has enabled us to create different communications for different communities and expand our portfolio for not just internal communication but also external communication.
The targeted, content-rich notifications have helped to reduce response times in our organization. We're now able to deliver the content on different platforms. Previously, we were able to send or receive voice and SMS communication, and we've always been able to receive notifications via email, but with the mobile app, we're able to send better information within our alerts. We're not restricted to so many characters within the notifications, and the format has improved. People can respond with different responses to different types of alerts. So, they're not just acknowledging an alert; they can now acknowledge alerts and send them to another person or send them to another group. It has enabled us to get notifications out with more information. We can enrich our notifications with better information and better response options. If they need to be escalated, we can escalate things quicker.
The IT alerting and call-out features are most valuable.
It is very intuitive when it comes to customizing on-call schedules, rotations, and escalations. It is head and shoulders above other products when it comes to configuring on-call schedules and managing your rotas, devices, etc. Massive improvements have been made during the lifespan of the product in that area.
A lot of the issues that we've had have already been addressed. However, they could be clearer with the actual throughput and the costs. The throughput that we signed up for was a lot lower than what we needed, and we had to pay a lot more to get the throughput that we needed.
I have been using xMatters for more than 10 years.
Its stability is very good. We very rarely had issues. They could have also been of our own making because we occasionally do flood the system with alerts because we get event storms that end up spawning thousands of alerts, but generally, the product is very stable. It very rarely lets us down.
It's very scalable, but because we are such a large organization, when we originally signed up for the current contract that we're on now, the throughput that we signed up for was a lot lower than what we needed. To get the throughput that we needed, we had to pay a lot more than what we originally costed for, but you get what you pay for. We handicapped ourselves by not buying the advanced product earlier.
At the moment, we have about 30,000 users. These users are mainly IT operations users, but there is a group of senior execs who also receive notifications. So, we've got senior execs on the business and IT side and the IT support community who use the system on a regular basis or on a daily basis.
I would definitely rate them a nine out of ten.
A lot of data needs to be fed into xMatters to make it work. For it to be successful, there is a lot of reference data that needs to be configured within the platform to enable it to communicate with the right people. We've used xMatters for a number of years, and there is a lot of reference data, such as users' contact details, groups, and systems, that xMatters needs for integration with to receive alerts.
We looked at the Everbridge solution a few years ago, and it was no way near as intuitive as the xMatters solution. Now, Everbridge has bought xMatters.
xMatters workflows haven't helped us to address issues proactively. We have use cases for which we build workflows, but they're not addressing issues proactively. It's normally in a response to an issue that we've seen or an enhancement that someone suggested that we should follow up on. Most of the enhancements that we do nowadays come from our user community. They are requested by our user community, and we can then use the xMatters workflow managers to build the solution.
I am not sure if xMatters' on-call schedules and streamlined escalations have helped to reduce SEV-1 incidents in our organization, but it has definitely enabled us to get messages to the right people sooner. The fact that we can send some of the lower-level alerts to the right people and they have improved response options means that they may have prevented further SEV-1s up the chain by fixing issues before they've become major problems.
We have not yet incorporated xMatters into our application delivery workflows, but we are looking into utilizing it. We're currently onboarding ServiceNow, and we will be looking at how we can improve the escalation and visibility of instances by using the integration capabilities between ServiceNow and xMatters.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.