xMatters Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.