We performed a comparison between PagerDuty Operations Cloud 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 most valuable feature is the phone app that allows us to send notifications without the additional fees when sending by SMS or phone calls."
"The product has valuable on-call scheduling, escalation, and incident workflow management features."
"The most valuable feature is definitely the flexibility of the schedule. The mobile app is quite also good for what we do: for receiving alerts, acknowledging, assigning, adding new responders. It has rich features for our needs."
"PagerDuty's best features are the dedicated application that allows me to reach my engineers immediately and the ability to directly assign specific tasks to individuals and have them report back."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It has scaled well for us."
"PagerDuty is very stable and very reliable."
"The SMS pages and the mobile application are pretty much the top two features."
"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."
"Having our users manage their own notification devices within xMatters is huge, since it takes the burden off our datacenter."
"The automated callouts, without a doubt, are most 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."
"We have reduced the time it takes to resolve major incidents through xMatters’s conference bridge management solution."
"We use xMatters for alarming infrastructure outages and failures of batch jobs (post-processing)."
"The ability to have the rota and then configure notifications that you can directly fire them into the group is most valuable. The India shift is from 2:00 AM to 9:00 AM, and then it is the UK shift from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM UK time, and then there is also a defined US shift and on-call hours. It allows us to make sure that everyone is going to get notified when they need to be about an issue. We can target specific locations or users with notifications."
"Made it very easy to implement our roster of people who receive alarms with the REST API."
"For our major incident management, it has expanded what we can do in terms of the format of the communication. People can subscribe, and they can receive delivery on multiple platforms, whether it's a voice message, email, or mobile app message. It enables us to deliver the right communication to the right people in the format they want."
"The solution's analytics are okay. I don't think the features, at this point, give you a lot of insights. We have actually been trying to get insights from it but it hasn't really given us a lot of extra points to explore. We were looking at the number of alerts to see where many of the alerts were coming from. We never managed to get many insights on this."
"PagerDuty's webhooks need some improvement."
"It cannot be integrated with our upgraded Jira system."
"The biggest area for improvement with PagerDuty is noise suppression. There have been a handful of incidents through our use of PagerDuty over the years where one incident may lead to 30 to 50 pages because you're monitoring all these different things, and each thing is an individual page. There should be the ability to set up paging tiers and group correlations between some of the different pages. That is something that would be really valuable. We should be able to say this one page may have a group or a tree of effective other pages that may tier off of it. So, if you see those pages independently, go ahead and alarm, but if you see this plus that, don't do that."
"Because of the way you have to structure the rosters, if an engineer has to go on leave (or something), you can't just go in and reassign/take this person out of all of the different rosters that they're in. You have to go into each of the rosters and take them out. There might be a roster for business hours, after hours rotation, and monitoring deployments. Each time we need to take an engineer out of the pool, e.g., if they're sick or on leave, then we have to go and touch all of those rosters, updating and replacing them. Whereas, if we could just take the person out and have it automatically fill in the rostering, then that would make life a lot easier for managing it."
"It’s quite hard to reach the support team."
"The On-Call Teams feature could be better in terms of levels of conditions related to which team or member should get the responsibility of handling a matter or incident."
"PagerDuty could improve the event orchestration by enhancing features, such as easier condition setup inside the orchestration."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"While they do have an extensive library of integrations, sometimes those integrations or custom integrations, require a more technical level of expertise in products outside of xMatters, such as Java."
"Additional built-in integrations with other applications would be an area of improvement."
"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."
"A lot of the issues that we've had have already been addressed. However, they could be clearer with the actual throughput and the costs. The throughput that we signed up for was a lot lower than what we needed, and we had to pay a lot more to get the throughput that we needed."
"The user interface could be more intuitive. Once you know what you're doing, you're fine. However, if you don't know where to start then it can be a bit difficult to figure out how to make it work and how it will function together with different tools in the Flow Designer."
PagerDuty Operations Cloud is ranked 1st in IT Alerting and Incident Management with 35 reviews while xMatters is ranked 3rd in IT Alerting and Incident Management with 31 reviews. PagerDuty Operations Cloud is rated 8.8, while xMatters is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of PagerDuty Operations Cloud writes "Effectively generates alerts for incidents, making it suitable for 24/7 monitoring of infrastructure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of xMatters writes "Enabled us to meet our "lights out" goal and repurpose staff to do work of greater value". PagerDuty Operations Cloud is most compared with Opsgenie, ServiceNow, JIRA Service Management, Splunk On-Call and BigPanda, whereas xMatters is most compared with Opsgenie, ServiceNow, Everbridge IT Alerting, OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management and Splunk On-Call. See our PagerDuty Operations Cloud 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.
