xMatters Reviews

• Major Incident Management
• Hosting conference bridge calls.
• Managing IT Support on-call schedules.

We have reduced the time it takes to resolve major incidents through xMatters’s conference bridge management solution. Instead of a service desk agent sending an email or manually calling multiple resources to join a bridge, xMatters directly calls the appropriate resources simultaneously. In addition to streamlining the conference bridge process, xMatters fully logs all notifications to show who was contacted, how they were notified (phone call, text message, email, and push), and if they responded. This helped change behavior across the organization to improve accountability.

Conference bridging and on-call schedule management. xMatters allows us to define scenarios that notify only the necessary people when we need to open a conference bridge.

Reporting is the weakest point of xMatters. Since xMatters has very limited reporting and only maintains logs of events for a short period of time, we export event and conference logs to our ITSM solution, so we can maintain event history and link it to Incidents.

We have had a couple occasions where xMatters was not available, but these were short events. For business continuity, we backup all users and schedules to an Excel file weekly.

No. We chose xMatters over other products because we felt it could grow with our organization. We have expanded its functionality, but there are still features we plan to use later, like geographic location-based notifications.

Technical support is very responsive. We have needed assistance building forms and have always received prompt and knowledgeable responses from xMatters support.

We had no prior solution.

Initial setup was fairly simple. The biggest challenge is that you need to define your process first, which is true of any tool (rules before tools). xMatters is a fairly open sandbox, so it can seem a little overwhelming until you start to dig into it. We started with a simple goal of hosting conference bridge calls through xMatters, then evolved it into targeted conference bridge scenarios based on the priority and system impacted.

You pay for the user, not the number of alerts. Therefore, xMatters provides a better ROI, if you can leverage it for notifications based on alerts from other monitoring tools.

xMatters is pricey, but you have to consider what a critical incident costs your organization. xMatters shortens the time to resolution, so the amount saved in potential lost revenue and productivity has justified it for our organization.

We evaluated HipLink, Everbridge, and PagerDuty.

xMatters had the best interface and the most functionality.

Consider the functionality you are looking for based on your organization’s need. Also, consider the integration options with your ticketing system and other alerting systems your organization uses. 

On-Demand IT Support group paging for critical incidents and paging from ServiceNow integration for incident management.

By adding the ServiceNow integration, we have been able to page support groups for critical incidents and move scheduling from ServiceNow into xMatters, offering more control to our support groups. 

The two-way integration between ServiceNow and xMatters also allows us to assign tickets to support personnel faster and respond to incidents faster.

1. ServiceNow integration for paging-related to incident management.
2. Web and smartphone app interface for paging support groups for critical incidents.
3. Web service integration for paging from legacy scripts.
4. User interface for support group schedule management.

1. Reporting could always be improved. Most of the data for events could be exported to csv files, but sometimes multiple csv files have to be combined to provide a full picture of multiple events for one issue.
2. Integration assistance. 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. If you are not a Java developer, it can be a daunting task to create an inbound or outbound integration yourself.

In the two years that we have used the system, we did encounter a few minor short-lived stability issues with one of their web servers. They were resolved quickly.

We have not noticed any scalability issues in the two years that we have used the system. We average 2000 voice and 35,000 SMS, with as many email deliveries per month.

On-Demand technical support is excellent. They are quick to respond and resolve any issue.

We used a legacy, half in-house written, half vendor supported on-premise solution. Our customer desired a cloud-hosted solution to take advantage of new technologies, integrations, and provide for DR stability during IT outages impacting on-premise infrastructure components.

Vendor assisted implementation was included, so their presence in the implementation project made for a smoother implementation and migration from the legacy product.

The On-Demand product setup was a breeze. The ServiceNow integration installation and upgrades have been painful.

This is our biggest issue: licensing. Our customer has only purchased a set number of full licensed users, and we are constantly running up against our license limit. To mitigate licensing concerns, we completely control at the admin level user additions and removals, and do a monthly cleanup process driven by security contractor removal reports. 

If the licensing were cheaper, our customer might buy more. However, I can’t imagine getting away from license management, unless the licenses suddenly became cheaper.

Our customer evaluated a few other products. I am not at liberty to reveal which ones, only that xMatters came in with the best presentation and demo to impress the customer.

Include Professional Services in the contract for implementation to assist you through all the hurdles of things that you do not know about the product. Since this is a cloud-hosted On-Demand solution, they have to be involved anyhow. Having them there to assist during implementation takes the pressure off allowing you to focus on the migration from the legacy systems.

We use this tool for our primary IT and Emergency Management notification tool. We use it to send incident notifications from ServiceNow. Our datacenter command center uses xMatters to send out outage and emergency notifications. 

The automation of the tool and the way it integrates with ServiceNow has improved out IT operations. Also, users can manage their own devices, which has saved our datacenter time because they do not have to manage on-call devices or rotations anymore. 

Using xMatters to notify our IT and Emergency Management partners is vital for bringing back IT services and notifying our partners about emergencies. Having our users manage their own notification devices within xMatters is huge, since it takes the burden off our datacenter. In the past, the datacenter would have to keep up all the on-call lists and rotations. Now, it is all automated in xMatters, which is a huge win. 

We have a two-way integration with ServiceNow, so incident notifications go directly to xMatters. Then, when the on-call person accepts the notification, it communicates back to ServiceNow and updates the ticket with the person who accepted the xMatters notification and puts the state to work in progress. This automation allows our datacenter to see the ticket has been accepted and is being worked. We also key our SLAs off the incident ticket being accepted and work so it keeps everything running smoothly. 

I suppose there is always room for improvement, but we have been very happy with the product. I suppose they could make the product more customizable, but they have been working on this with forms and scenarios that you can modify. We have not really taken full advantage of this new feature since we went from on-premise to the xMatters SaaS version. 

We have not encountered many stability issues. There was a couple times in 2017 where notifications were delayed, but this was resolved quickly by xMatters. 

No issues.

Support has been great. They responded very quickly to all the support cases that I have submitted.

No, we did not have a previous solution. We have always had xMatters and have been satisfied with the product.

The SaaS solution was straightforward, but we did have to migrate all of our on-premise data to the cloud (xMatters helped us with this). The integration with ServiceNow required some configuration changes, but they were not too complex. 

I do not get involved with pricing, since I am on the technical side of the tool.

I can’t remember if we evaluated others. It has been 16 years since we purchased xMatters.

I would recommend them to use the SaaS solution and tie it into their ITSM tool.

To notify our employees of system events that might result in an outage on our website.

It has improved our time to respond. Prior to the use of xMatters, it might take hours or even a day to get someone involved on a problem. Now, it's down to minutes.

Probably the most important one is that it persists in attempting to contact to someone until someone is engaged on the event.

Then, of course, there's the ability to define rotations and schedules for people who would be on call to handle those events.

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.

Three to five years.

We're using their cloud-based service or hosted service. We've never had any problems.

We've never had any issues with scale. It's always met our needs.

I would give them an excellent rating. They've been extremely responsive and always work an issue until it's fully resolved.

We did not have a solution prior to xMatters.

We've always used their hosted service, so we've never had to set it up. The only thing we have to do is train our users on how to use it. It's been pretty easy to do so. They've actually made many improvements over the years to make it even easier to train people.

It is worth the cost.

You need to know the number of users that are going to use it, which is usually pretty easy to calculate. It's on a per-user license.

We evaluated two other solutions. One was an internal solution that was provided by our IT department, it was a proprietary solution. Then, we also evaluated xMatters vs PagerDuty. We chose xMatters because of its cost and ease of use.

DevOps means that the person who's developing the software supports the software. When an event occurs that might result in an outage, xMatters engages people on that event so they can resolve it before there's an outage.

Certainly, it's been a very stable solution, very reliable, very flexible. It comes from a company that practices Agile development, so they're very fast to deliver new features, as well as any bug fixes, should any arise. I think the only challenges we've ever run up against is some compatibility with mobile devices and the providers they've had. Usually, that's the mobile device provider's problem, not xMatters'.

I would give it a nine out of 10, only because there are some devices that are not supported.

We use xMatters for alarming infrastructure outages and failures of batch jobs (post-processing).

• xMatters made it easier to implement our roster of people who receive alarms using the REST API. 
• The cloud solution reduces alarming to the core, which means no need to provision your server, which is great.

• The REST API has given us the chance to move away from manual work to fully automated updates. 
• The app gives way more information than a standard text message, making it more comfortable to interact with.

• The REST API is still missing some important functionality, which we require. 
• If you are not one of the big players of their customers, the chance that one of your minor wishes will granted are very small.

The tool itself works well, but when you try to apply real world use cases against it, it comes down a rating scale quite significantly (hence why it is a five out of 10). The feedback we get from our team managers to modify their schedules, it is very complex, hard to use, hard to navigate, and reschedule things. Therefore, my team ends up having to do this. From a scheduling standpoint, this is actually causing more work than what we had with Excel spreadsheets.

It has not improved our organization.

• The UI: It is easily navigable.
• For our organization, sending notifications out via subscriptions for outages.

• On-call management scheduling is difficult. 
• We would like to see the integration between our ITSM solution and xMatters.

We have had outages with the product. We have experienced functionality (defects), such as conference bridges can only be opened for four hours at a time and people get kicked out. That has caused some issues during some of our longer outages.

We have not contacted tech support regarding this, because usually by the time we get a chance to do it, the system is already back online. We have had some outages in the Asia Pac region. We have had only about two outages in the North America region regarding messaging. Most of the outages have been in the European or Asia Pacific region.

If you are willing to pay for the licensing of it, it is able to scale out. Also, the integration that they currently have with ServiceNow is very limited.

The customer service is quite responsive. They are quick to answer your calls or emails. They do provide good support. Even the customer service tech support side of things is fine.

It was complex in that the integration was very basic in order to apply it to real world situations. It had to be significantly customized and we have three integration points right now with our one ticketing tool which only handles for incidents. It does not handle any of our other processes. It is also very complex in that xMatters does not have the ability to clone what I have built in production back to our Dev environment to do any other further testing or development of the tool. It all has to be manually created and manipulated. So, that is a huge miss.

I do not think it is worth the value. I think it costs too much. It does not do anything significant over what some out-of-the-box functionality of the ITSM tool can do.

I would advise people to really look at their use cases to make sure that the scheduling portion of it meets their current business requirements as far as rotation goes. This tool works great if the team rotates on a perfect rotation. If it is a small team, it will rotate weekly or rotate daily. If you have any complex leave through it at all, it will not work very effectively. Then, you have to apply bushwhack-type solutions to it.

Then, in pricing, you are limited on your number of SMS messages that you can send a month and the licensing cost annually.

This product was already purchased by the time I came to the company. I just had to implement it. Because of budget and our mandatory upgrades in ServiceNow, we just have not had time to devote to developing the functionality within ServiceNow.

Be very careful on what type of use cases you have. It is going to require a lot of customization in order to meet real world requirements for sending out notifications. It seems to work decent for major incidents as long as the major incidents are short and sweet. 

Again, it does require custom code to notify on subscriptions and a limitation on your subscription templates is an issue as well.

On-call notifications.

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. xMatters handles the communication methods (phone numbers, preference of text, email, phone call, etc.).

One of the most valuable features is the integration with our ITSM solution. This allows P1 and P2 incidents to automatically do notifications to the group that they are assigned to. The groups can maintain their on-call rotations and methods of notification in xMatters. This will automatically go through a list until an alert is acknowledged, which will assign an incident to the person that acknowledged the alert. 

Having this automated has led to a significant improvement in incident resolution time (resolution can now occur quicker than the time to previously contact the correct person). All attempts are also logged to determine what occurred when and if they are successful or not.

Being SaaS-based is also a plus. Regardless of the state of our network or infrastructure, xMatters will still be available via a mobile device.

Integrations seem to be the most difficult part. Once setup though, they work well.

No issues.

No issues.

Good, but not excellent. They are courteous and professional, but may take longer than desired to resolve some issues. Integrations may require professional services.

We used manual methods previously, so this was a great improvement.

As this is SaaS based, xMatters does the environment setup. Adding users, groups, and on-call rotations is pretty simple. Roles are a little confusing as they seem to have too many. 

The most complex parts are the integrations. For us, this was the integration to ITSM and LDAP, both of which we used their professional services for.

Pricing is pretty straightforward and listed on their website. I recommend starting small and expanding later.

No. One of the biggest issues for us was an ability to integrate with our ITSM solution. As xMatters is a partner of our ITSM vendor, integration was not a concern. Being totally SaaS-based was a big plus. I have worked at other places that used xMatters and were happy with it. With reasonable OpsEx pricing and a product that met our needs, we did not feel the need to evaluate other options. I have used other notification solutions at other companies, and this is one that I am most familiar with.

It has been easy to use and very reliable.

The only potential concern is professional services. They are capable, but like to bill on an hourly basis. I would recommend having what you want them to do clearly defined upfront and keep close tabs on their progress as the hours can go by quickly if you do not keep on top of them.