We performed a comparison between BigPanda and xMatters based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two IT Alerting and Incident Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The main thing that we like about BigPanda is the user interface."
"Alert aggregation was the primary requirement. BigPanda pulls all this together into a single UI for us, allowing us to see related alerts grouped together into an incident, and enables us to easily create a JIRA ticket and Slack channel to manage an issue."
"One of the most valuable features of BigPanda is its user-friendly interface."
"BigPanda integrates well with other solutions, such as WatchGuard,"
"The best of a bad lot was the error message deduping."
"Easy integration - We've had challenges in the past integrating all of our various monitoring sources and tools into one central system. BigPanda, with the integrations that it already has, as well as offering webhook/REST API, has made it very easy for us to plug everything in."
"We have also made extensive use of the outbound integrations to ticketing systems (JIRA) and collaboration tools (Slack). The main driver for us has been getting all alerting into a single UI and enabling us to streamline our incident management process."
"Alert deduplication and correlation - In an environment like the NOC where you're ingesting hundreds and thousands of alerts from various monitoring sources, it's time consuming and difficult to go through individual alerts and also difficult to spot critical issues. It's been great to have BigPanda not only deduplicate alerts but also correlate alerts that are seemingly unrelated, to create a clearer picture."
"The UI: It is easily navigable."
"This has made it much easier to send notifications to a group or individual, as you just need to know the name and the message to send."
"For our organization, sending notifications out via subscriptions for outages."
"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."
"The on-call schedule that they have for groups is amazing in terms of how it works and how it triggers. You don't need to do anything. You just upload the users, and you have the calendar of the schedules. It is amazing how it works and how easy it is to work with this feature."
"Being able to split the week however we want is definitely most valuable. We can create shifts and also see other teams' schedules. It is a very easy search to do these things."
"The automatic logging that's built into xMatters, especially the timeline of events, is very helpful because we can figure out why a particular person got a call... Having that level of detail built-in makes it really easy for me or the managers to prove that's what happened, and we can self-serve that information. It gives people the autonomy to know why they got a call."
"xMatters stood out to us during our research because of the versatility of its rotas, how we could set up various group rotas, different shift patterns, the ability to order devices and add personal devices etc. It's a much more flexible solution than ServiceNow, the in-house tool we also evaluated."
"Our infrastructure is quite large - tens of thousands of servers, often with 30-plus checks running on each host with one minute intervals. This generates a lot of data often in bursts (when we have a large scale failure). This has caused some delay in the ingestion pipeline."
"We had to use a partner for the deployment."
"The UI for this solution could be improved. It is very hard to find what you are looking for."
"Lacks sufficient dashboard features."
"The observability can be enriched with regards to infrastructure and the application-integrated environment. The dashboard and reports could be improved."
"The solution could improve by having better integration."
"BigPanda can improve the correlations. We didn't see any big value. It is still good at the same event deduplication, event processing, and ticket creation, but I was more looking at event analysis and event correlation. In that area, it is still no big difference between the other solutions on the market. All of them, are in the same immature stage."
"The cost of this product is too high compared to New Relic."
"I would like to see some more user templates. There are roles — administrator, user, etc. — but it would be nice to create a user template that restricted what people assigned that role could do."
"When you are not using the conference bridge from xMatters and you are using an external one, it is a little bit hard to get the person whom xMatters calls to jump directly to the external bridge. They need to hang up the phone and then get to the email to get the URL so that they can jump on the bridge. There is no direct connection from xMatters to that external bridge, but I understand that part of the business."
"The reporting functionality could be improved, though I know that's something xMatters, inc. is working on. For example, sometimes I need to go into the platform and find users who aren't in groups that have been created recently, haven't logged in and so on. Previously, this was hard work, but they added loads of filters, making it more accessible. Still, the ability to create custom-designated reports that I could run and schedule would be fantastic for me. It would be good if they keep improving the reporting functionality, as it can be somewhat restrictive sometimes."
"On-call management scheduling is difficult."
"An additional knowledge-sharing program could be helpful and part of the demo workshops (right now, these only provide partial information)."
"What I would like it to do is tell me anytime there is a P1 incident, except when the ticket is assigned to this team or when this word is in the summary, but there is no exclusion option. I have been complaining about this for a couple years. At one point, we created a ticket for this with the developers to review. I assume that once enough people complain about it, they will bump it up in priority to work on. However, if not enough people think it is an issue, then they prioritize their work and work on other features and functionality. However, this is something that has been challenging for us because we have needed to find ways to work around it or just deal with it. So, I would love to see an exclusion option."
"We would like to see the ability to support custom devices. We have a lot of users who use Slack, which is another tool for communication. xMatters currently does not support Slack as a communication method. It can't send events to Slack and respond to them."
"I would like some minor UI changes. I believe I filed some enhancement requests with xMatters. For example, in one area, they have some way for you to look at a particular functionality with different sets of reporting UI. However, that same reporting UI is not yet available with some other functionalities. Essentially, in their existing functionality, the xMatters application does an excellent job, but in other functionalities within their UI, they don't have that. On the back-end, they are related. Instead of one click where you can see everything, right now you need to go to different areas to access similar information. It would be nice to have everything in one place. While they have an excellent element A, I am hoping that they could just simply make that feature also available in their element B."
BigPanda is ranked 10th in IT Alerting and Incident Management with 12 reviews while xMatters is ranked 7th in IT Alerting and Incident Management with 31 reviews. BigPanda is rated 7.2, while xMatters is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of BigPanda writes "Offers comprehensive alert monitoring and a user-friendly interface but requires manual validation to provide accurate alerts". On the other hand, the top reviewer of xMatters writes "A versatile solution with excellent logging capabilities that reduced our time to resolve ". BigPanda is most compared with ServiceNow, Moogsoft, IBM Tivoli NetCool OMNIbus, ServiceNow IT Operations Management and PagerDuty Operations Cloud, whereas xMatters is most compared with PagerDuty Operations Cloud, Opsgenie, ServiceNow, Everbridge IT Alerting and OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management. See our BigPanda vs. xMatters report.
See our list of best IT Alerting and Incident Management vendors.
We monitor all IT Alerting and Incident Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
