The automated escalations are the most valuable feature. We program in our escalation chains for each individual IT group. Being able to go out and request a resource from that team, and if they don't respond, that automated escalation makes it very hands off. So, our major incident managers and our network operations center can focus more on the other work that they need to do rather than chasing down those resources. They can rest assured that somebody will be answering.

Another valuable feature is the ease of integration into our ServiceNow platform, where we are doing all of our work between two teams. They are able to make requests from within the tickets that we can manage rather than having to use another portal or logging into Everbridge directly.

Reliability is their biggest value.

The engagement component is the most valuable, and what I mean by that is, if I were to send out an alert notification to a half-dozen people when a major IT crisis occurs, what I want to be able to do is remediate the issue as fast as I possibly can. For the sake of the business, I want to minimize downtime. What we were seeing in our prior systems, in our prior procedures and capabilities was that it would take quite a long time to get the right people to the table, making the right decisions to restore service.

One of the key drivers for us, and this is still one of the key benefits for us, is that Everbridge IT Alerting helps to pull those right people in very quickly through a collection of utilities where you can say, "I want to notify more than one person at a time. I want to escalate at my discretion and via rules within the system." It enables you to pull all the people into these bridge calls.

Let's say for example you have somebody in a group who is not online, but they are the on-call primary. The first iteration of a notification might go to them, but I can - depending on the nature of the issue - send a communication to the entire group under the anticipation that the primary on-call might not respond first. 

I personally love VCC because I just think there needs to be more data to support it so we can be more proactive and easily assess the impact. So, I appreciate the visual aspect, but it has to have the data to support it. It has proved very useful, particularly because we have a GSOC that's not technically 24/7. We do have an 800 number that people call 24/7. If something happens, they can easily send Everbridge a notification to activate the team off hours. It is useful in that respect too. We use it in conjunction with teams, but off-hours and for additional people outside of the core team, we use Everbridge, which is useful.

The most valuable feature is the support calendars.

In the past, in my previous company, we actually did a survey and we spent over 45 minutes trying to notify and engage personnel for any given major incident. Everbridge has managed to actually reduce that to under three minutes.

Even in my new company, our engagement time is sitting right around three minutes to engage personnel to a critical outage. This means that we don't have to spend time finding out who the on-call is, or find out what their contact information is. If they don't respond, we don't have to look up their manager or their director or their VP. Everbridge does that all behind the scenes and quickly.

We are just getting into smart orchestration, which I don't have much experience with yet but I am pretty sure that I will be learning a lot about it within the next year. To this point, it has saved us time compared to my previous experience with deployment.

For us, the most valuable features are the alerting and messaging, SMS messaging and text. We have a 15-minute window to get everything out and open, and without Everbridge we would never make that 15 minutes. Just the fact of who it alerts, and how it gets them on calls, is amazing.

The scheduling calendar is also very helpful and very useful. That's what we're looking to roll out. We have other incidents where we need to get people who are on-call to respond back to us and it's a very manual process right now. We call a person and keep trying until we get them. When we get this feature working in phase two, it will reach out to them and if it doesn't reach the first person it will reach out to the next one. The third call will go to the manager to let the manager know that the first ones haven't answered.

It's very customizable. For instance, if you're going on vacation this week, you go to your calendar and say, "I'm off this week, make the secondary the primary." And that's done on-the-fly. It's very responsive. It's very user-friendly. The guys don't have much training in Everbridge but they know how to go into the calendar, move their name out and move the next person up. It's very good.

The calendar is very dynamic. We use ServiceNow which has a calendar-based program, like Everbridge, but the two are night and day. Everything that I've been diving into with Everbridge is actually better than the products we have out-of-the-box. The calendar in Everbridge is much better. Your contact list is already there and that makes it customizable. With ServiceNow, it's very clunky. It's not intuitive and it's nowhere near as dynamic.

The integration to ServiceNow via the store app synchronizes our assignment groups within ServiceNow to groups within Everbridge, saving time for group managers needing to add personnel to on-call calendars. The groups->calendars feature helps scope each group manager's efforts in managing on-call resources.

The incident templates have a lot of flexibility in managing the behavior of an incoming incident, including what devices to contact and the user experience in general. 

The post mortem reports are descriptive, indicating who joined the call and when.

• It is easy to integrate. APIs connect to it. Because it is easily integratable with other software that we use, even homegrown, it does save money.
• With SaaS, we can implement in other regions without having to physically go to there.
• We monitor all our security threats globally on our big video wall, which is great visually. 
• The response time is real-time alerting. It is very helpful, because it makes things a lot easier. All we have to do is put a circle around a geo-fence and shoot off a message. For vessel support, they can be notified if there is inclement weather close by.
• We are able to do incident messaging for emergency notifications. We are able to monitor our security alerts. We are able to link all of these functions together. 

Creating the templates and being able to create my own variables are helpful features.

Their latest features are going to allow me to be a bit more flexible with using Everbridge for internal communications. We started using it for internal incident notifications a few months ago, and having that group lookup, allowing me to create a relation between a property and a variable in the template, and who should be contacted as far as a group in the organization goes, is going to allow for some nice self-service for our internal folks when we transition to a different Everbridge organization for our internal coms.

The email integration, the ability to launch from other programs using email triggers, was the primary reason we got the solution and it's been really helpful. We've been able to integrate our CAD system into it using it. The CAD system is kind of old and it doesn't like to talk to things so the integration is useful.

We also have a lightning protection system and were able to integrate it using email. The lightning was our main purpose for upgrading to IT Alerting but we have found other uses for it since then.

I manage the platform, and I don't really use it. The scheduling aspect of it is valuable where you create your groups and then either manually or via API call, you can initiate an alert. It'll look at the schedule and only contact those people who are on-call. So, it takes the guesswork out.

I think it's a robust solution with multiple modules that can be leveraged. I am looking at rationalizing the application landscape as we have too many applications in our enterprise to be able to manage them effectively. I'm trying to consolidate. What they've done until now has been very good. They've been very responsive and very helpful in answering questions. 

The most important feature, from our perspective, is the integration with our ticketing system. That eliminates wasted motion and time in drafting and sending and finding the right distribution list. It's all integrated with the ticketing system, so from the ticket itself, we manage all of the notifications that we send. We're able to manage an incident within the confines of the ticketing system at something like 70 to 80 percent accuracy. The integration feature with the ticketing system is of extreme value.

• Mass Notification and Conditions - This streamlines the process of notifying the proper people of an event without team members having to look up who they need to notify. 
• Calendar - Having the Calendar built in allows for on-call rotation to be set once and left alone.
• Slack Integration - Being able to have all the information from an incident and discussions documented through Slack, without input, is a great asset.
• Email Ingestion - Having the ability for ticket generation to auto-generate an incident through Everbridge has saved my team hundreds of man-hours it would have taken to manually create them. This aspect has been one of the driving factors in continuing to utilize Everbridge and finding all the new ways the tool will help with day-to-day operations.

You can build consistent templates. They give you a couple of different phone numbers, so if you have more than one incident (which we have had), you can page out to different people and have people run different call bridges from that point. 

The other thing that I personally like is the flexibility that we have to do updates four times a day. We do not just do it once a day or once a week. We do it four times a day. If somebody changes their phone number in the middle of the day, we will pick it up and be able to make sure if they are on call that night that we can call the right number. This configuration has been good for us.

There are quite a few valuable features. In terms of the general notifications, one of the things that was interesting and good is that you can configure the tool to escalate if no action is taken within a certain time period. That avoids sending off an alert that nobody deals with and where nobody knows that nobody has dealt with it. 

You can program in rotations, shifts, and scenarios of different kinds and it allows you to page multiple people, or people in sequence, or a group of people simultaneously.

Another good feature Everbridge has is deduplication. We had cases where everybody on a team had the same phone number. Maybe they were passing a cell phone around. When the tool sees that, it doesn't call the same phone number 15 times. It will call it one time, because it will see, as part of the list of devices and device hours, that it's a duplicate.

Once your users are defined, you can pop up a map and draw a circle on the map and notify everybody within that area. That geo feature is really useful if you have a particular incident where there is a protest on the street, a building on fire, a Hazmat spill. These are all scenarios that I've lived through.
It was crucial at that time to have a solution where one could say, "Let me draw a radius around the impacted building and have everybody in that radius contacted." That was a huge win.

When scheduling, it gives us the option to amend times or replace someone (with an explanation). 

The rules option has been helpful, as we can adjust the conditions in the template.

It's mainly for mass notification and pooling of contacts. Pooling of customers is valuable.

The most important features are the scheduling capability and the integration with ServiceNow. The ease of putting in a replacement person who will cover for you, or if you want to switch with two people, this is very easy to do. It is very easy to capture the calendaring and make sure everybody is aware of it. There is ability for it to communicate back and forth with ServiceNow and our ticketing system. This is much easier and more real-time in its capturing what is happening when a ticket opens, a ticket is accepted for work, and it is closed out.

There is also the application that you can install on your phone, which the engineers really like. If allows you the flexibility to choose: Whether you notify your home phone or your cell phone, and whether you get a text first. You get choose in what order, so the flexibility for each engineer is very good.

• System availability
• SaaS solution, so no infrastructure
• Mobile app

Powerful conference bridging that rigorously reaches out to stakeholders, which saves time working an issue. The mobile app provides ease of use for our resolvers and mobile push has proven quick and reliable. It also gives us flexibility around creating sometimes complex shifts within an on-call calendar.

The most valuable feature is automated escalation, as it eliminates a manual process which is prone to errors.

The ability for people to be able to join a bridge with one press of a button. It gives us the ability to contact the correct people via rules, based on conditions. 

• Incident management
• Ease of integrations