xMatters Reviews

We use xMatters for critical incident management. It's used when there's a true IT emergency, and we keep on-call schedules in the tool for various support teams. When the xMatters service reports a P1 critical incident, a workflow goes to an on-call team to evaluate the request. If the incident management team determines this is a critical incident, they will use xMatters. We have a template that notifies the necessary teams of an issue with the system and tells them to join a bridge call.

We only use xMatters' bridge capabilities for a disaster recovery option when Microsoft Teams is not available. Then, we send out a notification to the appropriate teams, asking them to join a troubleshooting bridge. Those teams are responsible for creating and managing on-call schedules in xMatters, so we're sending notifications to people who are up and working, not getting people out of bed.

We can instantly escalate a critical incident. Before we implemented xMatters, escalation for an urgent issue could take over an hour, but now we can evaluate the incident in less than five minutes. We can have a critical incident bridge spun up within 10 minutes, and all of the necessary teams join within 15 minutes, so it's cut our response time by 75%.

With xMatters, we can immediately notify the correct teams of a critical incident and ask them to join the bridge. Previously, it was like a telephone chain to get the appropriate people involved, but xMatters has automated that, drastically improving the response time. 

That automation is the critical aspect of xMatters. Without those workflows, then we would just have a system that maintains an on-call schedule in Excel. xMatters provides the notification workflow and ensures you're notifying the right person at the right time. That's mainly how we're using xMatters right now. We haven't felt the need to use coding to expand the functionality of the workflows. They're pretty robust.

Using xMatters' workflows reduces false positives. A high-level team evaluates an incident and determines if it's critical or not. That has reduced the number of false positives by about 60%. We didn't have that workflow so that anyone could call a critical incident. Then once we got people on the bridge, we would realize that it wasn't a critical incident. We couldn't vet the request. With xMatters, we have fewer false positives, so instead of having 25 P1s a month, we're now down to seven. But xMatters itself won't prevent our network from going down or an application from failing. That's not what xMatters does.

xMatters is easy and flexible. It gets complex when you have to go in and set up specific time zones and countries for the follow-the-sun-model to work. That takes some maintenance to ensure that we have all of the appropriate time zones for our users reflected in the model. But that's an administrative function for a team leader to set up. It's easy for them to create schedules or add people to different schedules. You can set the escalation path so that if one person doesn't respond, it will wait a certain amount of time and go to the next person. Or even go to more than one person at a time. There's a great amount of flexibility to customize, but it's also effortless to set up.

The on-call schedules and the escalation paths are straightforward to set up and maintain. The logs provide a level of detail that allows us to recreate exactly what happened in the communications. That's come in handy a couple of times. For example, sometimes people will say that they never received a notification, so we'll look at the logs and see whether it was delivered to their device or not. 

I would like to see some user templates. There are roles like administrator and user, but it would be nice if an administrator could create a user template that restricts what people assigned to that role can do. For example, in a standard user role, each user has a profile where they can update their mobile number or their name. It also allows them to choose whether or not they participate in specific workflows or want to receive phone calls versus SMS messages. We need the option to restrict that. 

When xMatters sends off a workflow, they should receive an email, phone call, and text, but they'll only get the email if they've opted out of the text and phone on their profile. Then we end up waiting on a bridge for someone from that team to join and realize that they haven't received the alert. They just got an email. We're using xMatters as our emergency alert system. If we just wanted to send out an email and wait for people to join, we would use Outlook. Unfortunately, we have no way to prevent people from choosing not to receive that level of notification. We would really like to be able to do that.

My company acquired the license for xMatters about five years ago. I only joined the company a year and a half ago, but the solution was purchased a while back. They purchased the license but didn't start implementing it until roughly two years ago.

We have never had an issue with xMatters. It's never gone down or been unavailable. We've never had something fail. It's highly stable.

I believe that xMatters is highly scalable. Senior management sees the value of this tool, and we are looking to expand our user base. We have about 200 users right now, and we're getting requests every day to add more teams to it. There is an executive group, which includes our CIO and all of her direct subordinates, and we have a workflow if we need to notify executive leadership down to first-level technicians. Those are the people you want to get on a call with first to evaluate an issue. It's used at all levels of the organization.

I rate xMatters support 10 out of 10. I've never contacted xMatters support, but I think it's good. I've had regular calls with our account manager, and we have a support engineer assigned to us. We've sent them email questions, and they answer quickly. And then they also do live webinars for new features. 

Positive

Before implementing xMatters, the administrators and supervisors went through training on the company site. We watched some training tutorials and followed along. After that, it was simple to start creating groups and workflows around that. The setup itself was intuitive and straightforward, but the training documents and the videos are excellent. They're much better than what you would typically find, I think.

We've seen a considerable return from xMatters, particularly its ability to evaluate critical incidents before everybody gets on a bridge. That's a significant dollar savings because we're not asking people to stop what they're doing and join a bridge, then it turns out to be a false alarm. I think there are quite a few features available, but we're not using a majority of them.

There's a significant difference between a full license, which allows people to respond to messages or acknowledge a message, versus a more scaled-down license, which only allows people to see the notification. The full license is significantly more expensive, so we need to evaluate whether new users need it when onboarding them into the system. It does require some active license management to make sure that people have the correct licenses, and we're not handing out full licenses to somebody who will never need to respond to messages or participate in an active workflow where they have a step they need to complete.

I rate xMatters 10 out of 10. We learned that we have to restrict who can use it when we're setting it up. This is another example where it would be nice to create a user template type. We found that when we're creating workflows, a user will believe that they can call a critical incident if they can see it. They'll do that without going through the necessary steps or evaluation. We had to do some work restricting who can see what workflow.

We use xMatters to handle system alerts. Generally, we use xMatters as an automated process in particular systems. For example, if the source detected an issue, it will use xMatters to alert the team member to resolve that issue.

xMatters is utilized as part of our system monitoring and alerting.

From the support team side, my focus is more account management, which is my primary task.

The end user accesses xMatters logs. As the support team of xMatters, we use their logs for troubleshooting, e.g., to see when an event is triggered, the process of that event, who was notified, and whether the delivery of the message was successful or not. If we cannot resolve a user's inquiry, then we will always work with xMatters' support engineering team to conduct further analysis.

Based on my support experience, it seems like our end users can integrate xMatters into event notifications and other applications successfully. Occasionally, we get support inquiries, essentially trying to understand how a particular functionality will work. If the functionality failed to work as expected, then we have always been able to get solutions from xMatters' support engineering team.

Here and there, we have made use of coding to expand the flexibility or functionality of xMatters workflows. I have created some custom workflow setups. For example, as part of account management, we do a scheduled process that will notify all the inactive users by sending out a notification via xMatters. It will ask them if they still need their account or not. Overall, the workflow is very simple, and the one that I built is not complex.

xMatters supports our usage and what our end users are trying to accomplish. As long as all our end users are supported on their operations, then as a support team, we are good with the product. 

The feature that I have found to be most valuable is the entire alert notification configuration, having an external system to trigger events that will process the alert to the supporting team. If a system is down, then you need to get it attention. Sometimes, it cannot wait until the next day. Therefore, how xMatters provides this type of integration is critical.

It is well-rounded. An individual will have to learn the UI. The UI and controls are easy to set up. 

The end user team has quite an extensive customized integration with other applications. Thus, I can only assume that our end users are heavily using xMatters.

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.

I have been using it for about a year and a half. 

I believe my company has been using xMatters for quite a while. About a year and a half ago, the global infrastructure application support team took over the ownership, supporting the product usage. So, I have been doing functional support for this particular application for about a year and a half.

The xMatters application is very stable. They also always keep the customer up to date with advanced notifications, e.g., if there is any scheduled system downtime. Usually, those downtimes are minutes. However, they will notify their clients when those things happen and are always able to provide the root cause, such as what took place and why the system was impacted. So, as a customer of xMatters, we never get left in the dark, trying to see what is going on.

All the maintenance is done from their end. They also proactively reach out when there is something causing some type of configuration abnormality in xMatters, which would be caused by perhaps one of our configurations. They will proactively reach out, and say, "Hey, you probably want to get in touch with your end user and help them fix it accordingly." However, that is really rare. In the past year and a half, this happened just one time. There is one team who has a workflow that contained an element that is no longer supported, and that was resolved very quickly.

xMatters is extremely scalable and extensible. The design gives you a lot of freedom on the applications that you want to integrate with xMatters. Therefore, they already have a large inventory of different application templates that you can utilize. 

There has never been an interruption because the traffic and the volume are high. This means that our external system can properly be integrated with xMatters, which will handle an alert without delay nor compromising the quality or timeliness of our delivery.

Our end user can be a group supervisor, meaning that they are the people who manage the group and on-call rosters. There are also developer roles. Those are the users who are doing workflow with development and integration setup. Lastly, there are just general users who are part of the on-call roster. They will get notifications when something happens that they need to take action against. 

xMatters doesn't own our content. They provide support activity, assisting our users in configuration, but xMatters itself is very intuitive. 

I would rate the support as nine or above (out of 10). xMatters' support engineering team is bar none with the service that they provide. It is always a pleasure working with them because they get stuff done. Other vendors need to use xMatters' support model as the model to follow.

They are very detail-oriented. They are always clear and concise. I can share their findings with my end user because they provide them in layman's terms, even non-technical end users can understand them.

Positive

Our team inherited this product. Therefore, we were not involved in the decision-making or evaluation of the product.

We went through the training material. It is like learning any other application. For example, if you are going to be doing workflow development, then you need to understand the workflow design and UI. Same as if you are going to set up a group, you need to know how to set up on-call scheduling and learn how to manage your team's roster for the group. 

Overall, it is very intuitive and straightforward. xMatters is one of the applications that does provide a lot of online documentation, in which they do an excellent job.

xMatters on-call schedules have helped to reduce Sev-1 incidents in our organization. This is based on users using the latest incident alert functionality to get their activities done.

You should perhaps arrange an evaluation or trial to just test it out. Get your feet wet. That is so important. If you don't try it, then you won't know. 

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.

We use it mostly for major incidents. To contact, we use the group on-call schedule feature. We use it to communicate and notify our IT stakeholders and executives.

We are about to use it for incident alerting on applications. We will first start using it for one application, and then we will see how it goes.

Previously, we used to do everything manually. We used to call our on-call resources manually. If we wanted to inform someone, we used to use Outlook email. Now, it is much easier because we're using the subscriptions based on location and affected services, which is amazing.

We have the Inform with xMatters feature and the Engage with xMatters feature. We are also using the major incident feature where it sends SMS and text messages. We use it only to communicate with the IT leadership, and it is great. Previously, we used to send text messages manually using our cell phones. I'm not in the US. I live in Panama. So, when I send a message, it normally gets a different number. So, no one knew how to add my number or whatever number they get from my cell phone to their safe contact list. Now, we have a specific phone number that doesn't change. So, they know who is calling, why they are calling, or why they are getting messages. That's very good. The customization of those text messages from the web service is also great.

It has helped us to build workflows that meet our needs. The ServiceNow workflow is very good. The Major Incident Best Practices workflow is another one. For our next application, there would be a new workflow that I need to create. We are also using the Emergency Change Management workflow, but the most important thing for us is major incident management. We use it for all Sev-1 and Sev-2 incidents and almost everything related to major incidents.

xMatters workflows helped us to address issues proactively. From the Major Incident Best Practices workflow, I created a workflow directly to Teams to post a notification on our Teams channel so that everyone who isn't subscribed on xMatters can see the notification that we're sending out. It helps a lot as well. I did it myself, and it was pretty easy.

xMatters provides targeted, content-rich notifications to reduce response times in our organizations. It has reduced the response time by at least 50%. Previously, we used to call people manually. 

xMatters on-call schedules and streamlined escalations have helped us to reduce Sev-1 incidents in our organization. We can contact any person. There is a 20% to 25% improvement because Sev-1 incidents are more related to the vendor. They are not internal issues.

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.

It is very intuitive for someone who is not technical. Some of the groups that we have are not technical, and as soon as they get on the mobile app, if they want to change on-call with someone else, they just quickly change. It is very intuitive, which helps a lot. 

We have integrated it with Microsoft Teams and Cisco WebEx Teams. We have also integrated it with ServiceNow. It is not at all hard to integrate it with other tools. It is very easy to integrate. You just need to follow the steps that they have on the screen, and that's it. I believe xMatters can integrate with a lot of tools. The problem that I'm seeing on our side is that we don't use most of the tools. Our main ITSM tool is ServiceNow, and I have already integrated it. I'm trying to figure out how to integrate custom applications that are only used at Brinks.

We use xMatters REST API for ServiceNow. It is very good. I haven't had any problems so far with that.

The integration with Inform with xMatters is too customized. It should be a little bit more friendly.

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.

On the web version, the on-call schedule is a little bit more technical. When you're creating the on-call schedule, you need someone who actually knows the product to create those. The problem is that we have not been using on-calls. Before xMatters, we used to use Excel Sheets. So, it is very complicated to do an on-call and figure out who's on-call. I know that I'm trying not to override one with the other one. So, I don't know if that can get better, but if they can, I know they will go there. They are the ones who are going to figure it out. They're very good at that.

We have been using this solution for almost a year.

Its stability is great. It is almost 99%. Everything works as expected, and I haven't had any issues with them.

Its scalability is great. I haven't had any issues. We have 76 technical users using xMatters, and we have around 250 to 300 basic users who are only getting notified by email.

We are using less than 10% features that xMatters has right now. We have plans to enable the incident management feature. As soon as we do that, I believe that the user or technical teams would have more visibility. They are reluctant to use ServiceNow, and this way, they can see that they have an incident, and it will probably give a better experience to our end-users.

In terms of integration with the rest of the applications, we're going to start with this new application. We have a lot of monitoring tools, and if we do everything right, as soon as ServiceNow gets an incident, we can trigger an event instead of waiting for an end-user to advise that something is happening. Currently, our monitoring tools are using actual people to monitor the queue, alerts, and other things. It is not as automatic as it should be. So, we are using less than 10% from xMatters.

They have been wonderful. They are great, and they helped me with everything. They are very knowledgeable about my environment. Their response time and everything is very good. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

We used Excel, and we literally used to type the name of the week, month, and the name. So, it wasn't like a solution. It was just uploading data. It wasn't that good.

It is a cloud version, so they do all the updates and maintenance. We didn't have to do any preparation to start using it.

I implemented it with xMatters.

I would say we have got an ROI, but I need to do the document report.

We're currently per license. We're paying around $44,000 per year for 80 full users and 300 standard users. For a new implementation, we also need to pay for an expert.

We looked at Evergreen. I know that xMatters merged with another company, and we tried that one as well. I don't remember its name. We settled on xMatters because of the text message feature. We wanted to see everything in a single box on the incidence, but the other applications were divided into boxes. The text was too long, and we didn't like that. 

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.

It is mostly used to schedule our on-call system to support our customers. We use it a lot to schedule people, put in absences, etc. We also use it to see the other teams that we can contact.

We have integrated it with Slack to see who is on-call. We do a query on Slack, and it just brings the information back from there. The integration was pretty easy. We just had to install the app, and after that, we got it going. 

It brought efficiency in terms of how quickly we resolve matters and how quickly we can get in touch with the person who is actually on-call. It has definitely helped us with efficiency in that. 

It has helped us in building workflows that meet our needs. We have such a wide network of teams. We are all across the globe, and to be able to interact with people at a short notice and be able to schedule where we know what's happening has been really good.

Its targeted, content-rich notifications have helped to reduce response times in our organization. We are able to set up notifications through our phones and through the system. So, we are notified of things as they come.

It saves a significant amount of time because I get the notification immediately on my phone when things are not working, and I'm able to quickly say "I'm on it," or "I'm resolving it." It is really helpful to have that integration. So, there is definitely a significant amount of time savings.

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.

Its intuitiveness and flexibility when it comes to customizing on-call schedules, rotations, and escalations are pretty good. It is pretty easy to use. It doesn't take that long to onboard people on this.

We cannot go back in time to check out the previous schedules that we had. We can only see them moving forward. I wish we were able to go back and see the previous schedules that we had. That's the biggest thing.

I have probably been using this solution for the past two years. We started using it when we moved to having on-call.

It is pretty stable. We didn't have any issues with it.

We have about 200 people who use it. We use Slack, Jira, and xMatters for our on-call work. We have already integrated it with Slack, but I'm not sure how it works with Jira. I don't know if it can be integrated with Jira. That is something that we will have to explore.

I have not contacted them myself, and I don't know if my company had to do it.

I have not used a similar solution previously.

I am an end-user of this solution. We were all given logins to use it, and we just started using it.

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't seem like it needs a lot of maintenance because of the scope of how much we are using it or what we use it for.

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 primary use case for xMatters is instant communications and stakeholder engagement. We send out instant communications whenever we have a major incident within the company. In addition to situations like this, we use xMatters when we have other high-priority matters and we need to engage the right people as quickly as possible.

We have integrated xMatters with other tools such as Workplace, Power Automate, and Microsoft Teams. It can be used to interact with other webhook endpoint URLs, as well. The Flow Designer is what we have built most of our integrations from, and once you know how to use it, creating integrations is very clear and obvious. When you are getting started, however, it can be a bit daunting and is not as clear as it could be.

There are plenty of tools that xMatters integrates with and they are always adding to that list. Also, if there isn't a pre-made integration available for a tool then you can customize and create your own. This is something that is very helpful.

xMatters has helped to automate our incident notification process, and they have provided us support with doing so. One example had to do with a major incident process that we have set up. Previously, it was a two-step process where our major incident management team would engage stakeholders to bring them onto a conference bridge. It was a two-step process to ensure that the major incident manager was available for the bridge and there wasn't an issue that the major incident manager was facing. With the help of our customer success manager at xMatters, that process was streamlined in such a way that the same level of customer security and two-step verification could still take place, but it was done with less effort needed on the major incident manager side. It still has the same output and meets the same criteria, but with less effort needed from the major incident managers to do it.

The workflows in xMatters have helped us to address issues proactively from the perspective of stakeholder management. It ensures that the right people are aware and advised of issues in the company. It also helps with managing our licenses, which has been very helpful.

Another benefit to using xMatters is the fact that it's always available, regardless of device. If we were to have an issue that meant I could not use my laptop, I can then go and use the app on my phone, or another approved device to be able to access xMatters. That's really helpful for me. It's not just the availability but also that it's usable on so many different platforms. I'm not restricted. This has come in handy in the past when I haven't been able to use my laptop to send out communication and I've had to use an iPad or a tablet.

The Flow Designer is quite valuable, as you can set up integrations and flows without necessarily needing to know about code.

The messaging solutions that are in place give us the ability to send out messages and communicate to stakeholders from the tool.

One of the main features that we use is the on-call escalations. The escalations feature works well for us if we are trying to engage the stakeholder and they are unavailable for whatever reason. It allows us to contact an appropriate representative from the area that we're trying to contact and bring them on to engage them. The escalations are flexible and customizable as well.

I use xMatters logs and I find that its logging capability is very accurate and useful. From my experience, it's been very helpful in diagnosing and troubleshooting issues and helping to identify whether the fault of an issue is something that I've set up in xMatters, or it's an external system that it's connected to. By looking at the logs, I can tell whether xMatters has fulfilled its operations properly and whether it's an issue within the tool or outside. Overall, I'm quite happy with the logging functionality.

We use the xMatters REST API for inbound integration, and it has been useful. From the API URL, we are able to trigger events from xMatters and streamline our processes for engaging stakeholders. It works well for us.

We have the ability to extend the functionality of the workflows using code, and this is something that I have done for some processes. For example, we post our instant communications onto a third-party platform, and xMatters will retrieve the details of those communications. It will then get a list of all of the users that we're trying to contact in the target audience and send them each a personalized message on that third-party platform, directly to them, of the communications that are sent out using the bot on that platform. That was all done through coding and it works in the background without anybody having to worry about it.

The fact that xMatters provides targeted content-rich notifications has helped to reduce response times because stakeholders are given details of what the incident is once they are contacted. Potentially, there are 20 to 30 people that can be contacted, and by having this process in place, we're able to contact vast numbers of people very quickly. The process very succinctly gives them the details of what the incident is, and it will call out the individual and bring them onto a conference bridge. This has worked well for us and it really helps us with engaging stakeholders.

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.

When you are not familiar with integrations and you're starting fresh, looking for where to begin, it is a bit daunting and not as clear as it could be.

I would like to see more information available in the reporting, including additional metrics.

I have been using xMatters IT Management for nearly four years. I began using it when I joined my current company.

This is a very stable and reliable product.

Scalability has not been an issue for us. If we target a small audience, it works, and if we target a large audience, it works. if we need it to interact with multiple different endpoints, it will do that as well. Overall, the scalability is quite good.

We have approximately 1,500 licenses.

The customer success managers have helped us to solve problems.

I have not used another similar solution.

There is no system maintenance to do, although we perform user maintenance. This is a case of developing and introducing opportunities for improvement internally, either to work with the flows and processes we've got set up, just to streamline them, or improve and better the output. This is something that we spend perhaps a few days a week on. I do the majority of work on the maintenance. Other people may give it a light touch but don't work with it to the extent that I do.

As the major Incident Support Manager, I deal with major incidents when they arise. In addition to that, I work on and develop different opportunities for improvement within MIM processes and tools.

As a company, we have seen a return on investment, but that was before I joined.

The pricing and licensing are okay. I wish that the user licenses were cheaper but the stakeholder licenses are at a reasonable cost.

Since implementing xMatters, we have evaluated other solutions. However, it does the job for us very well and there wasn't a need to move away from it. The main one that we looked at was PagerDuty.

Both of these are very similar tools and they both do a good job. From our perspective, we have stayed with xMatters because it already works.

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.

We use AWS CloudWatch to monitor our infrastructure, and when CloudWatch detects an anomaly, it sends an alarm to xMatters, which triggers a workflow. Depending on what the alarm is, the workflow will either try to remediate it automatically, e.g if it's the server running out of disc space, or it will look at our online dashboard to see if the affected server is in a maintenance window. If it is, it doesn't do anything else, because an alarm would be expected during a maintenance window. If it's not in any maintenance window, then it generates an instant on the dashboard so that our customers can see that the system's affected, and then it generates an xMatters alert for the on-call team, and then xMatters takes care of notifying whoever is currently on call that there's a problem to be investigated.

We recently released a software as a service platform and that required us to provide 24/7 support, something the company's never done before. I'd previously been using xMatters just within IT to monitor the systems for us, but not really for alerting us. For this service, we said, okay. We have a team doing UK hours during the week, the team doing US hours during the week, the team doing Asia hours during the week, and then we have the four-weekend teams that it rotates through. So there's that complexity that it handles for us. We've got monitoring of the systems, again, with CloudWatch, but then feeding into xMatters to alert who's on call. It then notifies the Slack channel for everyone so that you can see that something happened. Plus we've also got it tied in with JIRA service desk, so that if a customer puts in a high priority ticket, one that has to be dealt with within four hours, that raises an xMatters incident so that the on-call staff knows that they've got to deal with it very quickly. We just would not have been able to do that if we didn't know about xMatters. 

xMatters helped to automate our incident notification processes. If CloudWatch tells us that something's gone wrong, the workflow sets up an incident within xMatters and we've got it set so that it notifies the people on call. It also notifies the management team just so that they're aware that something's happened. Within xMatters, there's an incident template so that you can use that to record the steps that you take to deal with the incident so that when it's all dealt with afterward, you have everything in one place to create a post-mortem report from.

This automation of incident notification processes has immensely affected our ability to respond to incidents. It means that we can be on call on a weekend, but actually not have to sit in front of a computer all the time watching for things all the time. We can just go about, relatively speaking, our normal weekend lives, and when the phone goes off with an alert, then we know we've got an incident to deal with. It sets up a Slack channel specifically for that incident so that any chatter around what's gone wrong and how to deal with it is kept in one place and not in the middle of the general conversation, and that's all done automatically.

It has absolutely helped build workflows that meet our needs. I've looked at other platforms and I don't think I've come across anything else that allows you to write code to actually execute within the workflow, and that has absolutely 100% solved problems that we really need to deal with. These workflows also helped to address issues proactively. The classic one is the workflow to deal with the server running at disk space. So, we have it set up so that if the amount of free space falls below 15%, then it triggers the alarm and the alarm triggers the workflow, and the workflow doubles the space, and that is proactive. It handles this situation before the server actually runs out of space and that's helped us a lot as well.

We use the coding to expand the flexibility. The disk expansion one is 100% JavaScript that I've written. There are no xMatters bits in there at all. It's all written by me and actually the benefit there was that xMatters themselves don't have any support for calling AWS APIs, and so I actually had to work out how to do that. AWS APIs are quite funky around signed headers and stuff like that. That took quite a bit of doing, but it's something I've now made open source so anyone else who wants to call the APIs for xMatters, it's all there for them to get on with.

The fact that we can have different teams being assigned different areas of responsibility means that if an alarm goes off, you target the specific group for that responsibility. So, it means you're getting the right person at the right time.

One of the things that really attracted me is in workflows, you can write your own custom steps in JavaScript. You are not restricted to the steps that they provide. If you can write it in JavaScript, you can pretty much do anything. It gives me flexibility in ways that other platforms don't. For example, the online dashboard system we use is not a widely used one, but they have an API. So, I'm able to write the JavaScript steps to do things like check if a system's in the maintenance window or create an instant on the dashboard or change the status of an instant. I'm not dependent on the dashboard provider or xMatters creating steps for me.

It's very flexible. The intuitiveness of it is not great. It can be a little bit challenging to achieve all of the combinations and permutations you might want. I've had to build it out a little bit. It's not simple, but it's powerful enough that I can do it.

We have integrated xMatters with CloudWatch and the dashboard. We've actually got two different dashboards depending on which platform we're monitoring. I've integrated with that, I've integrated with Slack, I've integrated it with Google Chat. It's really easy to integrate it with third-party products.

They have a very strong selection of third-party integrations that they support. Out-of-the-box, Slack's there, Teams is there, Zoom is there if you want to set up a video call for an incident. You've got third-party platforms for data management, but even if they don't have something out-of-the-box, so long as the product you're trying to integrate with has an API and you are fairly conversant in JavaScript, you can do it yourself. It's that good.

We also use REST API. It's really strong at helping to customize processes and information. The only shortcoming I would identify is that when they're rolling out new features, the REST API can take a release or two to catch up, and that's because they'll be firming up on what the functionality is of the feature before allowing you to then start accessing it via the API. Initially, it's only handled by built-in steps. The Rest API is really powerful.

As an agent, as someone who is on call, I can mark an absence time and I can optionally put somebody in my place, but once you've done that, you can't edit it. You have to delete it and create a new absence, which is annoying, but it's not a massive issue. It's a minor annoyance. That's probably about the only thing I can come up with because I absolutely love the product. It's met our needs so well.

I have been using xMatters for two to three years. 

It's very stable. They do quarterly releases of new features. We've never had an outage on xMatters at all. It's rock-solid from our perspective.

It's really scalable. I don't think they give much away about how it's running behind the scenes, but they don't seem to place any constraints on how many workflows you have, what you do in the workflows, how many agents you have since you pay for them, that sort of thing. I don't remember any limitations that they announced.

We're paying for 15 users at the moment. Most of them are support agents for the SaaS product.

The staff for xMatters is brilliant. When we first started using xMatters we were on their free plan.

The great thing about their free plan is that it only really constrains you to the number of agents you can have using it. There are no constraints on workflows or anything like that, which is unlike other products that might have a free version they normally put limits in. With xMatters, it's only the number of users, but even there, you can get full technical support from them. When I first started writing my own steps in the workflows, not only do they help you, but they encourage you. You get really positive feedback from them and that helps you to feel positive about the changes you're making.

Positive

I have experience with Atlassian. The intuitiveness becomes a trade-off. I think that if a system offers a simple level of managing who's on call and things like that, then it is more intuitive to use, but you are constrained by that simplicity, and this is what I was saying about xMatters. It's a really powerful platform. You can do a lot with it, but that means that they have this challenge of how do they make it more intuitive to achieve certain aspects.

Initially, we were using it at zero cost and it was 100% meeting our needs, and I can't say fairer than that. And then when I was asked by the department that was setting up this SaaS product what I would suggest. I said use what I'm using. It will 100% meet your needs and I've got the experience of using it. We didn't even look any further because we knew we had a product that would do what we needed it to do.

I think it is excellent value for money. I can't remember what we're paying now, but the per agent cost is extremely reasonable for what the platform does. It's entirely agnostic of where you are getting your alarms from. You could even trigger an alarm by email if you want. It's that open to what triggers an event. 

I looked at Opsgenie briefly, which was acquired by Atlassian, and I didn't get on with that as well.

I evaluated it separately and before xMatters. I was looking for a solution. We are quite an Atlassian user. We used quite a few of their products, so that's why I looked at Opsgenie first, but ultimately didn't feel that it was a good fit for what we were needing, so I gave up on it and didn't think about much else. Then I came across xMatters at a conference. They told me about the free offering and all of that good stuff and I thought that there was nothing to lose in trying this one and it just went from there.

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.

We use it as an integration point with our monitoring solution, which is Micro Focus Operations Bridge Manager. We also have an integration point with Micro Focus Service Manager.

xMatters helped to automate our incident notification process. We generate incident tickets right from our alerts. That ability is excellent because we're able to respond immediately and indicate that someone has taken ownership of the alert.

We also use the coding to expand the functionality of xMatters workflows so that we can ingest information from a security solution. That will then generate an incident in Micro Focus Service Manager.

In addition, we have seen reduced response times, and the streamlined escalations have helped to reduce priority-one incidents in our organization.

The most valuable feature is getting alerts out to my user base. xMatters is the only solution that I know that has robust scheduling, calendaring for groups, and that provides very good delineation of who gets alerted and on which devices they receive their alerts.

It provides very robust and flexible means for scheduling and escalation. We use it quite extensively for making sure that we can schedule groups and the individual who is on call within them. We can make sure that, during office hours, everyone on a team receives alerts, but only the on-call person receives them after-hours via an SMS message. We use the calendaring quite extensively to make sure that we can schedule our shifts. Most of our groups include some form of escalation so that if somebody doesn't respond to an alert within prescribed timeframes, it will then send an alert to someone else.

The xMatters REST API is also very good when it comes to process and information customization.

I would like xMatters to provide users with the capability of administering it on their own. I do a lot of hand-holding with them.

I have been using xMatters IT Management for 11 years.

The stability of xMatters is excellent. It's probably the most stable piece of software that I'm responsible for.

To my knowledge, it's extremely scalable, although we have not scaled it at this point.

Currently, we have 170 end-users. 

Everbridge's technical support for the solution is better than excellent. Every one of the support analysts that I have dealt with for the last several years has been able to provide a very quick response and a resolution to any problems that we've had.

Positive

We used another solution, but that was more than 15 years ago. I believe it was called Automation Point, but it doesn't exist anymore and it didn't have an integration into Micro Focus Operations Bridge Manager or the predecessor product.

In terms of the preparation needed to start using xMatters, we had to do a full security audit.

We get value for what we pay. I'm not looking for a return on investment, I'm looking for functionality. The value is in the alerting functionality.

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.

We have three instances of xMatters. One is for customer support, one is for our internal IT, and the third, that we recently procured, is the SaaS version.

We have integrated two of our xMatters instances, the IT instance for ITSM incident management, and the SaaS version. We also recently worked on integrating customer support between xMatters and both instances, so that xMatters can be triggered from the SaaS instance and there will be a notification in the customer support instance. And vice versa: An alert from customer support will reach out to the on-call in the SaaS instance. And now we are working on integrating xMatters with change management and SaaS. In addition, we integrated xMatters with Salesforce.

At one time I was working in our global network operations center. We had a few difficulties in reaching out to the on-call resource. I would call someone only for that person to say, "Okay, I'm not on-call this week. You should call this person," and that person's number was unreachable. Then I would have to call the first person again and he would say, "Okay, now call this person," and he might also not be the right person. It was a time-consuming process and there was a delay in dealing with the service disruption. Implementing xMatters has helped us to identify who the on-call person is, and the built-in escalation really helps.

Managers can also get an idea of which on-call resources acknowledged an alert, and whether it was escalated to the next level or the third level.

Also, the targeted, content-rich notifications have helped to reduce response times, although we haven't measured by how much.

We have only integrated our Sev-1 incidences. Once a Sev-1 is generated, an xMatters alert is automatically triggered and the on-call person acknowledges the event. With that acknowledegment, the incident's status is changed to "in progress." As a result, responses to incidents are at 100 percent. We also have a checkpoint. When there is an event, a NOC engineer reaches out, every 15 minutes, to the person who has acknowledged the event, about whether there is a service disruption or not. With the quick responses to alerts, we have time to figure out what our outage notification or disruption message will be to our end customers. All of this definitely helps us to reduce the communication involved, as well as expedite the restoration of service. 

xMatters is helpful for getting the right on-call resources. That is a key factor. It is also very user-friendly, and just a little documentation helps you to understand things such as how on-calls are configured, how groups are configured, and how users update their on-call devices.

We're also able to specify messages for the different channels, such as text messages, voicemail, or email. That is quite helpful for us.

In addition, xMatters' reporting capabilities help managers to identify the peers and escalation that we have configured. It helps them see how many times an on-call either did not receive an alert or escalated it.

Another key feature set that xMatters offers is the API calls through which you can trigger xMatters. Because every application has its API, we just have to set up small workflows.

We also use xMatters logs on a daily basis. All incidents are created in ITSM and the logging capabilities are easy to use. We have integrated our xMatters with Okta. As a result, the authentication process takes care of the username and password. We haven't provided our users a bypass link so that they can directly log in to xMatters. Users have to log in using their Okta authentications.

With xMatters we have the flexibility to grant permissions to managers so that they can update their on-call schedules. They can change who is available in the next week, who is on the roster, et cetera. Managers can decide which person will be working on which shift. Some of our teams work 24/7, some work 24/5, and a few of our teams work 18/5. Managing all of them is a tough job and we addressed it by having the managers update their own on-call lists.

We have integrated two different xMatters instances. When something triggers in xMatters, we get a message in that instance about who responded, the device type, et cetera. But if we try to trigger it to a different instance, we don't get that kind of information. For that scenario we have built a workaround to get the details of the event, and that we have received a response for it. That's one of the major things that could be improved.

Another issue is related to the reporting. We have to know what keyword to search for. When we type something in, we get a few suggestions. If the suggestions are not enough, we need to go back to the specific event message and look at the actual event, and learn what needs to be updated based on that. We get that information from the Properties tab.

Thirdly, we have to create an Excel sheet for onboarding users and then upload it. But if an employee resigns, we don't have any checkpoints to validate whether the user is still active or not. We have to do that manually every week: Check who has left the organization, and do a cross-check on whether that person had any licenses or signed in to xMatters. If so, we have to make that profile inactive for a month and then release the license.

Finally, I get regular updates on the new features that are being released by xMatters. If they could provide a short presentation or video on these new features, and how we can leverage them based on our use case, that would really help.

We initially procured xMatters back in 2017 or 2018. We were looking to share these kinds of ideas with our internal and external customers who use xMatters, as well as ITSM.

xMatters is stable.

I only recollect once that we needed some maintenance, but that was also part of the 99 percent availability. The maintenance was done with zero downtime. I don't recall that we have had to do any maintenance on xMatters.

In terms of scalability, I'm managing two different instances of xMatters and someone else is taking care of the customer support instance. I believe that instance has 9,000 licenses. For IT we recently purchased 30 more so now we now have 180, and for our SaaS instance there are 200.

Whether we will increase our usage of xMatters will depend on how our business develops.

The technical support team is really helpful. They know what we are asking and what we are looking for. They don't work by saying "Step one, step two, step three." Whenever we submit a ticket, even if it is a P3 or P4, we immediately get an acknowledegment that they are reviewing our request and that they will get back to us. It's not like, "Okay, it's P4, let's respond after two or three days." Overall, their tech support has really helped us. And if the requirements or the scope go beyond their capabilities, they will involve our customer relationship manager. Once he is in the picture, if required, he will tell us we need to involve professional services.

But so far, there has not been an issue that a support person was unable to resolve for us. Some of the time there has been some back-and-forth communication, but in the end, we have been provided with a resolution.

Positive

Before xMatters we had a small portal where people could update their mobile numbers, whereas the ITSM product contained the on-call list. Managers would go there to update that list. But it was not being maintained properly and we had a tough time reaching the actual on-call person. With our first priority being to return our service back to available when there is a disruption, we got to know xMatters and replaced the old system.

As this was a new application for us, we were not aware of what might need to be done. The professional services team was engaged at some point and, through them, we got a few ideas about how this would help us, how we could integrate it, how the user profiles are built, how the groups are created, et cetera. 

The process of integrating xMatters with other applications was not too difficult. We already have the GIT files readily available, so it was just a matter of updating the scripts, connecting the dots, and it was really helpful in building the workflows.

The issue that is impacting things is the licensing. The features are really good. The solution really helps us to find the appropriate person, per issue, and to resolve each one as soon as possible. But what makes things difficult is the licensing. We have to manage the number of users we onboard, and we need a buffer of 10 or 20 licenses because in an emergency or crisis situation, we might need all those buffer licenses.

Still, we have definitely seen cost savings when we are restoring a service disruption. When a Sev-1 is initiated, xMatters is triggered and calls the right person and he acknowledges. On a weekly basis it saves us between $100 and $200.

Every customer would like a free ride, of course, and being a customer, I definitely feel the pricing is too high.

A caveat here is that initially we procured 150 licenses and we have almost 1,500 users in IT. We had to come up with a few ideas for determining which users get a license and which users don't need one. Due to the limitation of the number of licenses, we were unable to integrate the user profiles with Active Directory. 

Also, having that many licenses versus that many employees won't help us. It would be good if there was a feature where we could trigger all the users we need in a single go. That would really help in a crisis situation.

We didn't evaluate any other options. When we had the xMatters demo and we felt that it was the right product for us. The integration ability was the main aspect, as were the user profiles, the on-call list, and the delivery channels for messages. All of those really helped in our decision to purchase the xMatters solution.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using xMatters is that end-users have to manage their own profiles and know their availability for the on-call schedule. Also, if someone is not available to be on-call, the absence/replacement feature in xMatters really helps. The replacement enables us to know who is replacing whom, from when to when, and from which team. And with the recent launch of workflows, we can build our own workflows. I reviewed a few videos on integrating Teams or Skype with xMatters and that looks like a key feature.

The documentation from xMatters, in general, is very clear and the support is very helpful.

I use xMatters on a day-to-day basis. I have an eye on all three instances we have. I know which user is replaced by which user. And whenever the support team reaches out to me saying, "This event was triggered to me, but it should not have been triggered to me," we have all the logs to help us identify why that event was triggered to that person or why it didn't trigger to a given person. If we need any more help, again, the support team is there. We just submit a request and we get assistance. 

It has been a good journey over the last three years, getting more details about, and insights into, the product. It really helps us.