What advice do you have for others considering xMatters ?

I rate the solution nine out of ten. It isn't perfect, but it isn't far off, either. Regarding the intuitiveness and flexibility of xMatters when it comes to customizing on-call schedules, rotations, and escalations, it's pretty intuitive. We do a lot of proactive investigation into the system and monitor the solution, so we sometimes find a small number of users who set up their shifts every week when they don't need to. A handful of users don't find it intuitive, but when we show them how to set up repetitive shifts, they do. It's a tiny proportion of users we have to give some guidance to in this respect, however. In terms of ease or difficulty integrating with other tools, it is relatively easy because of the experience we've gained over the years. We've always had help from an xMatters consultant for sizeable integrations. With less experience, and if I were trying to do it on my own, I wouldn't say integrating is easy but certainly doable. When we look at the store, we can see the level of integration available with the product, and it's both extensive and impressive. We go with the integrations required by our use cases, we don't go out looking specifically for other integrations to use, but that's something we could consider doing. We used coding to expand the flexibility and functionality of the xMatter's workflows. The out-of-the-box solution comes with a plugin for ServiceNow, which provides the core elements to do a callout for an incident and assign an assignee to the incident. We had a use case for high-priority incidents where we needed a separate callout for the incident team. So, one for the assignee and the assignment group, which is out of the box, and a different callout to the incident manager and incident team. We needed the ability to trigger two callouts for the same incident, which was a custom requirement. We copied many original box scripts and modified them to provide a solution. The product didn't necessarily reduce Sev-1 incidents because the two are mostly unrelated. It helped us deal with them more efficiently when they occur, and the on-call schedules are its biggest asset. Getting to the right person on the right device quickly is critical for us. When we decided we would go with xMatters, I did some online training and looked at a developer instance of the solution to get used to it. I then worked with a consultant to start building out and learned the system's intricacies. There's a lot of online documentation to help figure out the necessary plugins and roles, and I followed a walkthrough to get the plugins. We had a developer instance of the solution and a production instance, so we set everything up in the developer instance and then transferred it across. I'm a big advocate of the product, and I recommend it. I've been working with it for ten years. We considered other solutions, not just in the beginning, but every time our contract came up for renewal, we've always gone back to it. xMatters does its core role brilliantly, and it's continually updated with new functionality and improvements. As a company, we have yet to find a solution that compares to xMatters.

xMatters workflows haven't helped us to address issues proactively. We have use cases for which we build workflows, but they're not addressing issues proactively. It's normally in a response to an issue that we've seen or an enhancement that someone suggested that we should follow up on. Most of the enhancements that we do nowadays come from our user community. They are requested by our user community, and we can then use the xMatters workflow managers to build the solution. I am not sure if xMatters' on-call schedules and streamlined escalations have helped to reduce SEV-1 incidents in our organization, but it has definitely enabled us to get messages to the right people sooner. The fact that we can send some of the lower-level alerts to the right people and they have improved response options means that they may have prevented further SEV-1s up the chain by fixing issues before they've become major problems. We have not yet incorporated xMatters into our application delivery workflows, but we are looking into utilizing it. We're currently onboarding ServiceNow, and we will be looking at how we can improve the escalation and visibility of instances by using the integration capabilities between ServiceNow and xMatters. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

We don't use xMatters in full scale. We haven't tapped into the full potential of the platform. We only use just a part of it. We don't use its logs as part of our operations, and we also don't use the REST API or coding to expand the flexibility or functionality of workflows. Similarly, we haven't used xMatters to automate our incident notification process. We use Jira for that. We also haven't incorporated xMatters into our application delivery workflows. The workflows haven't helped us to address issues proactively, and its on-call schedules and streamlined escalations haven't helped to reduce Sev-1 incidents in our organization. I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. There are things like having to remember when we were scheduled, but there are also some really neat features. It is easy to be able to get notifications, set up the app, and schedule absences. It is a pretty straightforward solution.

Our workflows are built in ServiceNow for incident pieces. In xMatters, they are built for just the form data. So, we have built workflows, but that's just our particular instance. We primarily use workflows on xMatters for form data. On the workflows on our ServiceNow side, we interject the REST or an email integration to xMatters. During the workflow of ServiceNow, based on the type of event, we trigger xMatters and move on to the next piece of that workflow. xMatters' on-call schedules and streamlined escalations must have helped to reduce SEV 1 incidents in our organization, but I can't give the numbers. Now, people are getting notified, and we have records of all the high-priority and critical-priority things. So, they've done a little tech debt resurgence there and tried to minimize all of that. Nobody gets woken up at 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, or 5:00 in the morning. Our incorporation of xMatters into our application delivery workflows is minimal. We do use Dynatrace alerts to message xMatters. Other than that, it is basically for when you have configured databases that go down or things like that. It is all reactive. We don't have to set up anything proactive. It hasn't helped to increase the application release rate. It is probably at a stagnant level. It is a resource constraint thing for most of the teams around here, and it has nothing to do with the tool's shortcomings. It is all resource-based. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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 initially was the infrastructure technician who worked on setting up xMatters, and I am now mainly responsible for any escalations with xMatters in terms of operationally managing the SSO-based access user roles. If we do have an issue, which is few and far between, and if it goes to a major incident, I get involved. I'm one of the main users, and I provide L3 support for the product. So, I'm well-versed, and I understand the product well, but at first, it requires a little bit of work. If a user were to log in and configure the office hours shift, it is not the same as just having an Excel sheet that says that ABC is on call Monday to Friday, then XYZ is on call over the weekend. To get the full benefits out of this product, you need a little bit of understanding of shifts, rotas, etc. For that, you have to go and read through the documentation, but these are the things that we expect the users to do. If you're going to be supervising one of the groups, you have to go and read through some documentation to make sure you understand what you're doing and how to configure it. If you don't want to do that, then drag and drop for shifts is pretty simple. If you want to just go and drag and drop a shift each week, you can do that, and it would be extremely simple. You have the options, but it is just that here we try and encourage its users to do it the proper way. Its on-call schedules and streamlined escalations haven't helped to reduce Sev-1 incidents in our organization. Sev-1 incidents are always going to happen, but it has probably speeded up resolution times or at least speeded up the engagement for us to make sure that we've got all the right people on the right call. It has also allowed us to notify users, or at least affected users and executives, in a more prompt and efficient manner. Instead of the in-house-built integration approach, we are now looking at ServiceNow integration by using the actual plugin. Essentially, what we are doing at the minute is that we have a script that makes API calls to ServiceNow to get all major incidents in the last 24 hours. We pull that data from ServiceNow via our script and convert it into a format that xMatters likes. We have a workflow configured for it, and we use the xMatters API to push or post that data into xMatters. The users can subscribe and say that if there's a major incident for my application, they want to get a notification. The actual plugin that we are looking at implementing and getting security approval for seems very simple. It is basically all GUI-based. It is simple to use. There is some work involved in terms of setting up the users in group sync, but hopefully, we'll be able to move to it because there are many more features that we would be able to utilize. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

When it comes to integrating xMatters with the Micro Focus solutions, I wouldn't say it's excellent, but it's certainly more intuitive than most integrations that I've done. Overall, I recommend xMatters regularly to people. I don't recommend other solutions.

In regards to all the functionality xMatters provides, I learn every day while working with end users. I like to say that I would never consider myself as an expert of tools, instead I am a jack-of-all-trades. That is why my learning will never stop. I would rate them as 8.5 out of 10 since no application is perfect.

The solution is excellent. I would rate xMatters as nine (out of 10). The workflow configuration is not really friendly for people, like me, who are not developers. Everything else is great. If you really want to reduce your mean time for restoring a service during a major incident, xMatters would definitely be the right tool. I haven't encountered another tool, not even ServiceNow, that starts calling people during a major incident. For this purpose, it is definitely very helpful. At the end of the day, our goal is to keep environments 99.9% available to customers. The only way to achieve that is to reduce the mean time to restore a service whenever there is a major incident. Definitely give xMatters a shot and some time. It can look a bit complicated, but you can attend their roadshows and free training, offered during the pandemic. That helped us a lot, because there are things in the tool that you will find out were there that you never thought were there in the first place.

Most of the time, Sev-1s aren't something that a tool like xMatters would be able to mitigate or resolve. We do a pretty good job with problem management, incident follow-ups, and post incident reviews. Oftentimes, we try to get ahead of those before they become a Sev-1. It might help in the lower levels, when it is still a Sev-2 or Sev-3. That way, it doesn't bubble up to become a Sev-1. However, I can't think of any specific use cases where we had a P1 incident and we were able to say, "Let's use xMatters to do X, Y, Z, and prevent that from happening going forward." I would rate this solution overall as eight out of 10.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It's not perfect, but it's really damn close to it. My advice would be to give it a try. It literally costs nothing to try it and there are a lot of integrations that you can easily add that xMatters provides. You don't have to do coding. You don't have to know JavaScript. It's really easy to put the steps onto a workflow and join them together. If you check for results and branch off to do different things depending on what the results are, there's basically a lot you can do without having to do any coding, but if you're comfortable with JavaScript, then the sky's the limit. You can really go for it.

I would advise others to ask for a PoC to understand the product to make sure that's what they're looking for. They should also check if they're going to use the text message feature and the calls. They should know how much they are going to use and if it is covered with their contract. That's applicable to most of the companies because that's an expensive service. I would also advise others to pick all xMatters trainings. There are three to four minutes ones. They help you to understand what you can accomplish from the application. We have been using xMatters mostly to communicate and engage. We are going to use xMatters logs as a part of our operations. We're going to implement it for new applications. The implementation would start next week, and it is pretty simple. We're going to use email-based alerting. So, we only need to add the xMatters email there. The rest of the workflow needs to be added in xMatters directly. It is pretty easy because that application doesn't have API connections. We haven't automated our ticket incident notification process because we have some challenges on our side, and we're still trying to get better at incident management. We're trying to change the culture before we enable that feature. We haven't made use of coding to expand the flexibility or functionality of xMatters workflows. I haven't gone that far. We're mostly in the workflows and the flow designer. It has not increased the application release rate, but everything has gone as expected. The biggest solution that I have learned from using this solution is how to automatize the communication and engagement with the IT team to improve the mean time to resolve incidents. I would rate xMatters IT Management a 10 out of 10. It is awesome considering the breadth of features it provides and the cost of the solution.

We do not use xMatters to send incident notifications, such as an alert when there is a major incident. Our primary uses are stakeholder communications and the engagement of stakeholders. We don't use the feature that allows it to act as a middleman that will receive information from monitoring tools, then pass it on to us. My advice for anybody who is looking at xMatters is that if you're looking to send out targeted communications to end-users, whether it's a few or many, and you're trying to be very specific in your workflows, consider xMatters. It's capable of communicating on multiple platforms and in multiple ways. Also, if there is anything that you're stuck on then you can look through the forums or reach out to xMatters for help and see if they can provide you with assistance to get things working. Overall, it's a very capable tool and if you keep working at it, it will do what you need it to do. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

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

DevOps means that the person who's developing the software supports the software. When an event occurs that might result in an outage, xMatters engages people on that event so they can resolve it before there's an outage. Certainly, it's been a very stable solution, very reliable, very flexible. It comes from a company that practices Agile development, so they're very fast to deliver new features, as well as any bug fixes, should any arise. I think the only challenges we've ever run up against is some compatibility with mobile devices and the providers they've had. Usually, that's the mobile device provider's problem, not xMatters'. I would give it a nine out of 10, only because there are some devices that are not supported.