xMatters Reviews

This solution integrates with the service desk tool to allow for the appropriate notification of support teams. You can set up a queue of people and you can assign their devices, their priorities, and the order in which they are called. It allows for shift work and it can all be automated once it is set up. If somebody has to be contacted then it happens automatically through the interface.

The system works by allowing for support queues, where you can define who is available and who is on-call. Then, based on ticket priority, you can define what kind of notifications take place. For example, if it is an urgent ticket or a priority-one incident, then you need to make a phone call. In contrast, if it is something minor for one individual, then it's typically going to be an email and that's the extent of it.

The automation provided not only expedited communication, and therefore the ability to address issues, but also ensured that the data used for communication is managed.

The most valuable feature is the automation because it reduces the demand on resources. It automates the escalation of a ticket if the person doesn't answer within a certain amount of it, and it passes it on to the next person. People are required to respond, for example, by pressing the one key on the phone to acknowledge the call. If it was an email then it would require a reply or similar type of acknowledgment.

Having this level of automation is a great benefit to being able to more quickly contact people. It reduces the amount of oversight required, and consequently, the amount of time to assign and get a response on a ticket.

The integration with other systems needs to be more flexible.

The interface is a little bit rigid and can be improved. For example, it tends to operate on the attribute of a record. So, if a group has a name, it tends to want the group names as opposed to, for example, the ID of a record. It creates a problem because if you rename the record then you lose all of the connections.

The data validation and verification need to be enhanced so that when data is changed, it reviews it in an automated manner and catches all of the anomalies. Otherwise, all you're doing is shifting the workload from an operational standpoint to an administrative one.

We began using xMatters IT Management in 2014.

PS, I am no longer with the firm and do not know if it is still in use.

This is a stable solution. This system runs 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and stability is not an issue.

This solution is fairly scalable. In the organization where I had this running, we were handling up to 150,000 incidents per month. There were 5,000 incidents a day and an IT staff of 1,000 people. I'm not sure if it would even be cost-effective in a smaller organization.

I would say that their support is above average, although not exceptional. It depends, in part, on who you were speaking with. However, part of the reason that we sometimes struggle with support is that we are outside of the norm for what is expected.

The initial setup was complex. The reason for this is that the interface is not as sophisticated as our needs.

The configuration is partly done in the service desk tool, where it gathers the contact information or it reads it dynamically. xMatters stores the method and the parameter for contact. As an example, if the method is to contact via email then the parameter would be the email address. If the method is a phone call then the parameter would be a phone number. You can set up other methods, too, depending on how sophisticated your environment is.

Implementing and deploying the system took six months to complete, including testing to makes sure that it worked.

The cost of this solution was less than the cost of staff required for the same job, so it is saving money.

This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution. There were some additional costs during the implementation because it was well beyond their standard configuration.

At the backend, this service is initiated internally, but the notifications and alerts are sent externally to the vendor through web service calls.

My advice for anybody who is implementing xMatters is to be sure that they have a very clear plan on how they want to process whatever communications they're doing. The tool can do almost anything but you have to come to the table with the process well-defined, before you being implementation.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We have two primary use cases. One is alert notification and escalation. The other is major incident notification.

In the past, when there was a major incident notification, which is an outage for one of our products, we had one tool that we would use for email notification to our internal stakeholders, another tool for a voice blast going out to their phones, and then another tool for a conference bridge. All of those needed to be kicked off individually and managed individually by our enterprise operations center. It was very difficult to manually maintain call lists - who was on call when - and up-to-date contact information. So, when there was an outage, we didn't have the right people on the bridge, it took forever to get people on the bridge, it took us a long time to notify people there was an issue.

By using this tool, it's a one-stop shop. Through one tool, we're able to generate email notifications, voice notifications, mobile push notifications, Slack channel notifications, all managed from one place, simple and easy to use. People are able to join the conference bridge directly from the phone call by pressing one button instead of having to dial into a bridge and remember a conference code.

Everyone's contact information is up to date, people are able to go in and update their contact information and even set things like when they're going to be on vacation and who their backup is. 

It has dramatically cut the amount of time that it takes to get people assembled during a major incident.

Its ease of use and self-service are important to me. It's very easy for users to go in and modify their own contact information, for managers to go in and manage their own on-call rotations and shifts, so that is a very valuable feature to me. 

And the ability to notify and get everybody on a conference call, rapidly, is also very important. 

It serves as our communication hub. We're able to point all of our alerting tools at xMatters and have it route alerts to the right people at the right time. We're able to generate major instant notifications for product outages, get all of our people on the bridge at the same time, and include information from our monitoring tools with that. So everyone is speaking the same language and seeing the same information.

We're able to route those notifications not only to people, but also to other tools like Slack channels, where everyone can get in and collaborate.

While the documentation is good, the knowledge base - the collection of user supported community forums - is a little weak compared to some of the other products I've used. If I have a problem that I can't find the answer to in the documentation, there are very few places to go after that, because the user base, the community forums, are not strong for me to find someone who's had the same issue as me, and find out what the answer to their problem was. That's somewhat of a weak point.

Regarding issues with stability, none that I can recall. There have been some scheduled maintenance and downtimes, of course, but we've always been told ahead of time and have been able to plan accordingly. I honestly can't recall an unscheduled outage that we've experienced with the product.

In terms of scalability, there haven't really been any issues. We use the On-Demand version, which is the cloud version, not the on-prem, and we've never had any issues with the scalability.

Maybe, if there are a lot of people to be notified during a particular incident - if we're talking a couple of hundred people for instance - it takes a little while for everybody to get called, which I would expect. But I've never really thought about that as a scalability issue. In the end, everyone who needs to get notified gets notified.

I've used tech support a couple of times. I have worked with support before, to change permissions and roles that we don't have permissions to change, but mainly, when I do have questions about actual solution implementation, I typically will work with our technical account manager, and reach directly out to them and not go through support. And that's been successful for us.

We originally used a tool called AlarmPoint. We used it for about the first year and a half I was here. We were planning on punting it because it wasn't very useful, and when we contacted the team to tell them that we were going to not use their tool anymore, they said, "We're no longer AlarmPoint, we're xMatters, and the tool that you're using is years old. Why don't you see what our new tool can do?" That's actually how we were introduced to xMatters. So, we previously used an old iteration that was very outdated.

We also did use PagerDuty a little bit, which is a competitor of xMatters. And the reason we chose to go with xMatters over PagerDuty was that, while both were very good at alert notification and escalation, when we did our assessment, PagerDuty did not have the ability for the major incident notification process that we needed to implement as well. It's more just for alerting on-call people when there is an issue with the server, and not necessarily for assembling a large group of people, whether they be business, technical, management, on a bridge to actually provide information and collaborate.

It was pretty easy. It took a little while because we have a lot of products and a lot of different teams that need to be notified for different products, and a lot of different policies. The implementation wasn't difficult, it just took time.

I would definitely say it's worth the value. I wouldn't say it's expensive, but most people who pick xMatters are not going to select xMatters based on price. There are other lower-priced competitors that are out there. But I would say for what we're getting, it's worth the money.

We did evaluate PagerDuty, as I mentioned earlier. We had originally evaluated directly PagerDuty against xMatters, and we used each of the tools for about six months on a smaller scale, and ultimately we found that xMatters was going to be the right fit for us. That's when we really expanded the usage and bought a lot of licensing.

I would say, before you begin with implementation, you should really have a good idea of what your notification standards and policies are. Completely irrespective of a tool or technology, if your process isn't rock solid, and if you haven't really thought out your process and what you're trying to achieve, it's going to make it much more difficult to try to implement the product itself.

So before you begin implementation, really plan ahead of time. Understand what it is you're trying to achieve, understand how you're going to measure the success of the project, and have all of your standards and policies laid out beforehand. It will make the implementation that much easier.

I would say it's a nine out of 10. And to bring it up to a 10, once again, if the user community knowledge base forums, were a little better, and it was easier to find answers to some very difficult questions without having to engage our technical account manager, I would give it a 10.

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 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 no longer have to manage the notification process manually.

• The ability to notify teams and monitor those notifications in real-time.
• Time-based escalation of notifications helps us resolve issues much more quickly.

Some features that have been around a while could be refined or updated, in the same way other features of the product have been updated.

Beyond the typical grouping, xMatters has what is referred to as dynamic teams.  Dynamic teams are criteria for setting up and targeting a group of people that meet specific criteria. The good thing about this setup is that you do not have to specifically target a person, or add them to the team. If they meet the criteria that has been configured for that dynamic team, the user will automatically be added to that team, and receive the notification.

The bad thing about this setup is that you cannot alter those criteria through the typical xMatters import/export process. The attributes that create the criteria for dynamic teams can only be altered via the Web UI.  So, if you want to create a new dynamic team in a mature xMatters environment (one that is already populated with hundreds of users), and you want to add, say, 100 users to that dynamic team, you have to do it manually.

In contrast, if you want to alter a custom field, you can do so via import/export. But you can't have an unlimited number of custom fields, so in a large environment with a lot of teams, team provisioning becomes more difficult.

If custom attributes could be exposed to the import/export process, provisioning of these dynamic teams would be much easier.

Three to five years.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Technical support at xMatters is very responsive and knowledgeable.

There were some issues with user-adoption, but those have been mitigated over time.

Licensing varies widely, depending on usage. It can be cheap or quite expensive, depending on volume and features.

Put together a comprehensive knowledge base to help your end-users get acclimated with xMatters.

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 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.

Positive

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.

I've used it in two different capacities. The first one is as a user where I've had to initiate notifications either to a large group of support teams or page individuals through the tool. I did that probably four to five years ago, and then in the last three to four years, I've been using it as more of an admin where I'm building out form scenarios and different communication vehicles for our command center staff.

The biggest improvement is from the standpoint of making sure that we can use the 911 feature. Our company is realizing the benefits of using xMatters as a 911 calling feature internally. The way we use xMatters is the way you would use the 911 feature to be able to contact a call center and get the police, the fire department, and the ambulance to your house within a very short window. It provides the ability to do that. Five years ago, we had maybe 30 911 related calls a month, and now, we're averaging over 400 911 related calls a month. A lot of it is because our organization is growing so fast, but xMatters has that ability to help us when there is an emergency or an event where we need to pull in multiple teams. We can do that very quickly with xMatters.

It gives us every ability to customize as we need. We don't really have any crazy ideas of what we were expecting from the tool. It lets us cover our largest teams with 50, 60, or 70 people in a team. It lets us have multiple escalations within those teams. Multiple shifts with in the groups allow us to see any gaps or scheduling conflicts and even lets us assign a backup on-call when someone is scheduled off due to vacation or an illness, a backup solution is already there in the tool. So far, we haven't seen anything that we couldn't do in the tool related to scheduling and on-call coverage in groups.

We have currently integrated it with MS Teams as a conferencing and chat solution. We have it integrated with OMNIbus and Splunk, which are alerting tools. So far, I haven't had any problems integrating it with other tools. They give us a lot of options. We can integrate it manually by adding the links as drop-down options to integrate with those conferencing bridge lines or the MS Teams chat links. If we want to integrate through bots or through other ways, they give us multiple options. Currently, we're using a lot of manual integrations. So, we're uploading links and allowing individuals to select the appropriate integration, and then from there, they can select which conference bridge or chat they want to select from drop down values. So far, it has done what I need it to do.

We have over 350 notification vehicles for the applications that we support, and we've automated 8 of those with our alerting tools. It has helped with our more highly visible, and what we consider critical, applications. Instead of having someone to detect the alert and then send out a manual notification, we allowed our integration with OMNIbus and Splunk to automatically trigger those alerts, which has saved us 5 to 10 minutes. This allows for teams to start troubleshooting an event 5 to 10 minutes faster than they normally would. We're seeing that type of integration with alerting grow. We've received 5 to 7 new requests for automation notifications this year. So, that's going to grow. At this point, everybody who is using it really likes it. I can tell that we're going to be moving in that direction of having more automated notifications in the future.

It allows us to be aware of an issue faster. It allows us to respond and start troubleshooting an issue faster. As a result, our customers and our internal support teams are probably happier that events go away or are resolved at a faster rate.

It helped us to build workflows that meet our needs. The workflows allow us to push out multiple communication vehicles to our command center or support teams. If we didn't have the workflows that are built into xMatters, it would be hard for us to push out these large complex communication vehicles. The workflows allow us to use the same properties, same scenarios, and the same forms to push out and streamline the communication vehicles that are available to our staff. If you had a hundred people using a hundred different pieces of paper, it would be hard to maintain, but if you can have everybody using the same notebook and using the same cheat sheet, it gets easier. The workflows are like those cheat sheets. They make it faster, and they make it easier, and when we make an update, it's cascaded to all the forms and the scenarios as part of that workflow. So, it streamlines our work from an administrative standpoint.

It has reduced the response times in our organization. Since I've been here, problems get resolved faster. Because of xMatters' automated notifications and the ease of use, people can send out notifications and get together faster to solve problems. 

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

The most valuable features are the ability to have groups and then have an on-call rotation in the groups. Outlook lacks both these features. Outlook gives you the ability to contact an individual or groups, but you can't contact them based on an on-call rotation, and you can't have built-in timing escalations inside of that. xMatters gives you the ability to do that, which is important when you have 50 or so people in a team, but you only want to contact the person who is on-call. You don't want to create unnecessary noise with your large support teams. xMatters allows you to page the right person who is on-call versus just creating excessive noise for a group. If you send an email via Outlook to 50 people, all 50 of them have to get it when maybe only two people are responsible for actually working on that problem. The other 48 people would consider that noise. xMatters has the ability to deliver it to a targeted audience within that group.

In terms of restoration, if you delete something, or you have multiple users that have the ability to delete a group, a user profile, or a workflow, the ability to restore it within the GUI is not available. A button to go back to a good point in time would be really nice. A lot of other tools have a better backup and restoration solution, but xMatters is a little bit short on that. They have a 95% backup restoration solution available, but the other 5% requires manual effort. We would like to be able to just push a button and say, "I want to restore this piece back to this date," but we can't do that with the tool right now.

I use its logs on a regular basis. It seems like it logs everything accurately. To be able to pull the data from the logs via the GUI is a little cumbersome, but it does give you the ability to export into Excel, where I do have the capabilities of doing pivot tables and some advanced searches within Excel. 

I have been using this solution for over five years.

We haven't really had any issues. In the last five years, there has been a 15 to 30 minutes outage here and there. It's usually because of an cloud issue or issue related to single sign-on doesn't allow us to access the tool during the outage. From the tool standpoint, it has been pretty dependable, and we're fairly pleased with that.

The number of users that we have across the whole organization is around 6,000. They could be using it in three different ways. One as administrators, where they're administering a group or workflow. Another is an initiator of a notification, where they would go into xMatters, fill out the form, and then submit or send the notification. and then, there is also a large audience around the world that is a recipient of the notifications. They are the users who only receive notifications so they can be aware of an event or participate in troubleshooting activities.

Their tech support is pretty good. There is an online account where you submit everything online. The user interface for that lacks a bit of quality. It has a whole bunch of open fields, but the team that receives the email stating the problem and provides assistance does a really good job. 

Their communication is a little overboard sometimes because when you send the email, you get an auto-response saying that they got your message. Then, there's a live agent that says that they got it and are working on it. After that, within 10 to 15 minutes, you actually get the response that you're asking for. So, there is a little bit of extra noise. You send one email and you get three back, which seems a little excessive. 

I would rate them an eight out of ten. In some cases, I'd like to not have to go back and forth so many times in an email. I'd like for them just to say that this is a complicated scenario and if we can schedule a call or a screen-sharing opportunity to troubleshoot, but they prefer to go back and forth in multiple emails, which delays resolving the issue that we're having. That's just a learning curve on their end for them to figure that out. 

Positive

We basically used an advanced SharePoint site that allowed us to do a search to figure out which team supports a specific application. It gave us instructions on how we would engage that team. It wasn't a communication vehicle. It was more of a contact or a phone book for looking up a team, but it wasn't a communication vehicle. We had to use the phone and our email systems to contact those teams that support a specific application. It was more of a phone book lookup system.

I have personally not used any other solution. I've been a recipient of notifications from other solutions, but I haven't built or sent notifications through other communication vehicles other than Outlook.

I was just a user of the tool when it was deployed. I wasn't an admin. To start using the solution, there was training. We had to learn how to use the tool by setting up the workflows, forms, and scenarios. We also had some advanced integration questions for which we had to learn how to use it. We met with the vendor, and they provided us with a high level of support.

In terms of maintenance, because of the lack of a restoration and recovery solution, we do perform a lot of manual backups of components within xMatters. So, we're prepared in case something were to be deleted, and that would be the biggest maintenance activity.

There is a return on investment. Being able to restore internal and external customer applications and services has pleased our customers. It has given us the ability for a higher level of service to our customers. So, there is a return on investment.

I'm not really involved with the cost standpoint. I've only heard rumors of how much it costs. It seems to be on the higher end from a cost standpoint.

My team does not use its REST API. I know that there are other admins who use it, but not my team.

I would rate xMatters IT Management a seven out of ten. The backup restoration solution is a big piece, and that's the main reason why I would rate it a seven.