xMatters Reviews

My team manages the xMatters platform for our company. We're not just end-users of the platform. We configure and manage the platform for our company.
So, I'm probably a superuser.

I wasn't around when they started the implementation process, but I know what they basically needed was real-time alerts. So, if somebody were to create a high-priority incident and we had something that was production-down, we needed to alert the appropriate people in order to get that resolved. If I remember correctly, they didn't have anything before xMatters, or the solution they did have was very flaky and didn't process as xMatters would. So, the use case for it was to get less downtime.

There is also the business continuity side, such as knowing what locations people are in, where xMatters is used a lot more than the IT side. For example, if there is an active shooter in a single location, you can use the business continuity side of xMatters to send out an alert to all of the employees asking them to take cover, get out, and do something, or if a building blows up or is on fire, you can send out a message through the business continuity to say that nobody comes to work.

We definitely saved money because of time to react and minimized downtime. Efficiencies have gone up because less downtime makes for better efficiencies. Auditing, reporting, and logging are helpful when an event kicks off. If everything is configured properly, when an event kicks off, we have a record. For example, we can say, "This was supposed to be sent out at this time on this date. Here you go." We also have a record of whether somebody reacted to it or not.  xMatters not only sends out an event alert; it also tells you, "I'm trying to message this person after however many minutes, and their shift is set up. This person did not respond. We're going to go to the next one." So, the escalation process for this is on point.

We have a couple of integrations. ServiceNow is one. Its integration isn't seamless, but it is as close as you could probably get in the IT world. We also use a Lenel integration, which is like a hard access deal. It is home-built though, and it is almost like it shouldn't be there.

When I first started on the team, we had an ITSM tool called EasyVista. The integration that we used from EasyVista to xMatters was a completely customized integration. We customized the xMatters side of it and the EasyVista side of it to super tailor everything down to a T, and then, a few years ago, we moved over to ServiceNow, and we decided we didn't want to do so much customization within either tool. So, we went more out-of-the-box, which produced some issues and problems. They were not necessarily from xMatters themselves. They were more or less related to the process change where we had to tell the users that this is how it's going to be going forward. It won't be the same, and we understand it won't be the same, but to enable better upgrades and less vigorous testing, we want to use more of an out-of-the-box integration. It was great that xMatters already had a pre-built integration to ServiceNow. They're a ServiceNow partner. So, basically, you install the plugin and set up the plugin for your instances, URLs, endpoints, and other things, and then you're good to go. You don't have to change form data. You don't have to change values and variables. It was a big positive.

I personally don't use its logs. Our company uses the log part. So, if we have an auditable incident or issue, or something comes up that needs to be traced and audited, they use the logs, and they use the reports and everything else that xMatters gathers during an event alert. We'll use all that information even for legal purposes. I'm sure that's happened in the past.

We use xMatters’ REST API. It is excellent for customizing processes and information.

It has 100% helped us to automate our incident notification process. Before this, we didn't have any escalation process other than a manual call to the next person.

The incident notification process has definitely affected our business in a positive way. We can now set up escalations, and we can set an alert to contact xMatters and trigger certain form data. So, when there is a high-priority event, xMatters takes over the notifications and then escalations.

For us, their biggest feature is event alerting and the retention of those events. This way, if something goes wrong, we can provide a report of everything that was sent out and everything that was captured.

In terms of intuitiveness and flexibility of xMatters when it comes to customizing on-call schedules, rotations, and escalations, for me, as an IT professional, setting it up isn't that big of a deal, but I understand that some people struggle with it because when you get wrapped up into it. You can get lost. It's not super complex, but it's complicated enough to the point where you can say that you should have done it another way. The shift part can be confusing for some people. In that respect, one of the shortcomings my team has found is when we have to add another person, such as a new hire, to xMatters, we can't add them to a group within xMatters without having to put them on a shift. If we put them in a group, they have to be on-call. We can create their account, and then they're just out there in limbo until their team says, "You have to be on this shift." One piece of feedback for xMatters is to figure out how to have manageable groups so that they're contactable from xMatters. They do not necessarily have to be on a shift right from the start or at all for that matter. That would be the number one thing. Our boss says all the time, "Well, you got to create them and add them to the group," but we can't exactly add them to a group because we're not on that team. We don't know if they should be on-call, and if they should, whether the shift they have installed is during the business day, after-hours, or a weekend. Everybody has got their own shift created, and we would not know what shift to put them in. We could start asking that on new user creations, but when we're doing new hires, it's more or less just common practice to create all their accounts. We can't create an X manager's account for a few things. That's not how we have it set up. We could change all of that, but that's where there is a gap. 

One of the shortcomings or room for improvement is that their mobile application seems subpar. They could really revamp it and make it function a lot better. There have been too many times when it timed out, and you don't even get to know it. You could go a month or two months without getting an on-call alert, and then, you get one, but it is never alerted in the application. So, if you don't have your cellphone number set up, you'll never get notified, and then you go back to the app to find out that it has automatically logged you out, and you can't get back in. The mobile applications, for both iOS and Android, should definitely be revamped.

I have been using this solution since 2017.

It is very stable. We've only ever had two issues with xMatters as a vendor, and when we did have those issues, they were on top of it and fixed those issues immediately.

Its scalability is excellent. It is very scalable.

Their support has been fantastic. We have regular meetings with account managers and even tech managers on that side. We might be one of their larger clients. So, every time they have a major release, they set up meetings with us, and we can go through the new features they want to introduce and the stuff that has been maturing lately. It is a very good relationship. I would rate their support a nine out of ten. There is nothing against them, but there is always room for improvement somewhere.

I have not used any similar solution. This would be the first one for me. I know ServiceNow offers one, but I don't know how good that is. I have heard of a couple of other solutions such as PagerDuty, but I don't know anything about them.

I wasn't around when they started the implementation process. In terms of maintenance, they handle most of their upgrades. I like that if they have a major release, we're getting put on that major release. We aren't 10 releases behind because they manage all of the instances themselves, which is great, and that's one thing off my team's back.

I know roughly what we pay per year. For what we use it for and what its purpose is, it is very valuable.

Our workflows are built in ServiceNow for incident pieces. In xMatters, they are built for just the form data. So, we have built workflows, but that's just our particular instance. We primarily use workflows on xMatters for form data. On the workflows on our ServiceNow side, we interject the REST or an email integration to xMatters. During the workflow of ServiceNow, based on the type of event, we trigger xMatters and move on to the next piece of that workflow.

xMatters' on-call schedules and streamlined escalations must have helped to reduce SEV 1 incidents in our organization, but I can't give the numbers. Now, people are getting notified, and we have records of all the high-priority and critical-priority things. So, they've done a little tech debt resurgence there and tried to minimize all of that. Nobody gets woken up at 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, or 5:00 in the morning.

Our incorporation of xMatters into our application delivery workflows is minimal. We do use Dynatrace alerts to message xMatters. Other than that, it is basically for when you have configured databases that go down or things like that. It is all reactive. We don't have to set up anything proactive.

It hasn't helped to increase the application release rate. It is probably at a stagnant level. It is a resource constraint thing for most of the teams around here, and it has nothing to do with the tool's shortcomings. It is all resource-based.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

The use case is mostly getting people on a call as fast as possible, especially since we heavily use ServiceNow. In one account, it has really been more to reduce the time to resolve issues. This has usually been very difficult since they don't have a paging system. They would start asking the command center to call this person or that person, then multiple people were being called, joining a bridge, sending emails to a distribution list, and searching names in the directory. 

When I came to this account, they had already been using it. It was really more about protecting the workflows when I came in. 

It reduces the mean time to restore a service. Before, it would probably take an hour to get everybody settled down. With the integrations right now, if somebody flags a major incident, then everyone is on a call in the next 15 minutes.

We usually only use xMatters for major incidents and when multiple teams are needed. We don't really use them for anything else. When there is a major incident, you need probably three to five teams on a bridge to resolve an issue. If you are looking for the right person and finding out who is on shift, then you have already wasted an hour, at least, trying to bring in people. So, if our service level agreement for priority one is two hours, then imagine wasting an hour trying to bring everybody because that means you have one hour remaining to fix an issue. So, it definitely did help. Our time did go down for priority one cases. Our average went from more than four to six hours down to about two to three hours.

xMatters has helped to automate our incident notification process. Because, if there is an integration where they flag a ticket, that is a major incident. It will then be automatically assigned to our incident managers. When ServiceNow assigns a ticket to us, the integration will automatically page our incident managers, and say, "Somebody said that there is a major incident." That has definitely helped because we are also not running 24/7 operations. So, it kind of helped ensure that somebody was looking at it at any given point of time. However, other teams don't really use it for notifications on their day-to day-operations. The only notification that they get from xMatters is when it pages them to ask them about joining a bridge for a major incident.

The most valuable feature is the ability to page people and get them on a call as fast as possible. 

The integrations with other tools, such as ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams, really help a lot to reduce the steps needed by incident managers to do their job.

On-call schedules are very easy and user-friendly; they are not difficult to use. I have taught a couple of people how to do them, and they were able to follow quickly. Its on-call schedule and interface are probably a lot friendlier than ServiceNow. We don't really use on-call schedules a lot, except for incident managers. Everybody else is 24/7. 

When I integrated xMatters and ServiceNow, I now know which messages were sent just by looking at the logs in a ticket. I know who accepted or declined the messages. So, these logs are really helpful.

It took me awhile to get used to whatever was available in the interface. The interface from two years ago was a bit more confusing when looking at where you should go. Once I got the hang of it and found where I needed to go, it was easier than I thought. The only limitations have been when I was looking for a specific integration that would allow me to integrate with ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams without going through multiple channels, e.g., just click a button in ServiceNow and the rest will be done. That is the part where I really needed help. However, everything else is easy and straightforward, such as configuring what the alarms would look like and configuring how to send a message without coding.

I haven't had the chance to play around with the new workflows. So, when I attended their roadshows and a couple of meetings about it, I didn't really pick it up that quickly. It sounded a bit more complicated my level of skill, since I am not a developer. Therefore, I still needed to sit down and understand how it works. Right now, we really don't have a business case to use it yet. 

I started using xMatters somewhere around 2017 or 2018 with my previous account. I am a consultant for this company, and we are a third-party managed service. The company outsources their services to us. Before my current project, I was with another account where we also implemented xMatters.

I have not had any complaints since we have been using this. I haven't heard any really bad feedback. If we did receive bad feedback, it is really more about people complaining that xMatters keeps calling them, but that is the way I configured it. If there is a major incident, until you pick up, then it will keep calling you. So, if they are annoyed with the amount of time it calls them, then that is not xMatters' problem. 

I have only heard a couple of complaints about not receiving alarms. That was once or twice in the two years that I have been using it. They didn't get a notification once or twice. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get in touch with xMatters at that time, but it wasn't really a big deal so I just let it slip away.

The most maintenance, which I have been doing, has been adding and removing users. This could be solved if they had enough licenses, so when we add them to ServiceNow, they would automatically be assigned an xMatters license.

Adding users is five minutes per user, but we don't really have a lot of users in the environment. We have 200-something from time to time. We only give licenses to team leads, managers, directors, vice presidents, and C-level executives. It is not like we have a lot of users who come in and go all the time. Once in a while, they tell me somebody has left and ask me to remove their license. That does not take a lot of time.

The support has been excellent. They are very knowledgeable and approachable. I work with a person who was kind enough to help me write the code for the requirements that we were looking for. That really helped us a lot and took our xMatters integration to the next level.

Positive

This is the first solution of this type that we have used.

I had the privilege of at least playing around with the tool before I joined this account. With my previous account, when they started using it, I knew the very basics of what it was and what it was for. However, being the admin and configuring everything, that was a first. For a while, I had to really dig deep into using the dev environment and looking at the fields, e.g., what they are. 

I have a knack for figuring things out myself, though It took awhile, but I attended a couple of training courses and sessions also with xMatters last year. That really helped a lot. There were things that I didn't realize were there, and those were the things that helped make it what it is today.

Integrating it with ServiceNow was a bit more difficult than I thought since I personally don't have a developer background. So, I relied on mostly common sense to figure it out, but my common sense could only take me up to a certain point. I then had to reach out to somebody from xMatters to help me, and he did all the coding for us. 

I am not really privy to how much my client is paying for this service. They just tell me the number of licenses that they have. Every time that I say, "I need extra licenses to make sure that all Level 1 and 2s have their own xMatters account," they keep telling me that it is too expensive. If the only purpose is to call people, it doesn't justify the cost of paying more than the number of licenses that they already have. 

This limits my ability to implement other things that I had hoped could have been implemented, like the notifications. For example, I could have used notifications to inform people that there is a P1 or P2 assigned to them. However, because of the limitations and licenses, we could not. 

We explored the ability of ServiceNow to page people. Though, we didn't really have an opportunity to deep dive into that because somebody decided to use xMatters instead.

The solution is excellent. I would rate xMatters as nine (out of 10). The workflow configuration is not really friendly for people, like me, who are not developers. Everything else is great.

If you really want to reduce your mean time for restoring a service during a major incident, xMatters would definitely be the right tool. I haven't encountered another tool, not even ServiceNow, that starts calling people during a major incident. For this purpose, it is definitely very helpful. 

At the end of the day, our goal is to keep environments 99.9% available to customers. The only way to achieve that is to reduce the mean time to restore a service whenever there is a major incident. 

Definitely give xMatters a shot and some time. It can look a bit complicated, but you can attend their roadshows and free training, offered during the pandemic. That helped us a lot, because there are things in the tool that you will find out were there that you never thought were there in the first place.

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.

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're relatively light on use cases. We primarily use it for notifications. We're not using the Incident Management module, but we are using the SOAP service. So, we use it for integration and for holding all of our rotas and groups, and that's our main use case. Our local teams go into xMatters to invoke those groups based upon the tickets that get created in ServiceNow. They'll be for a particular team, and that team's on-call rota is held in xMatters.

It has reduced the time to engage engineers. This reduced time leads to improved ticket resolution and ultimately, to improved service provision for our clients, which is the ultimate gain. Our systems are down for less time because the engineers are engaged much faster.

We also quite heavily use subscriptions. We use those by way of just simple notifications to third-party stakeholders, and that has proven to be a big gain because it makes customers aware of the incidents. In addition to the resolving engineers, you can add third-party stakeholders in the notifications. Customers have been very keen on taking up subscriptions because it gives notifications to their stakeholders about the status changes of an incident and what's going on. I know that has been very well received.

We have automated our incident notification process with xMatters via subscription. So, essentially, as the support groups and engineers have been engaged to go and resolve, we also have numerous subscriptions set up so that a client's stakeholders and our internal stakeholders are notified at the same time. They would be client delivery managers from our side of the fence and then the actual client contact points on the client's side. It just gives us a very quick, easy, and effective way to increase notification awareness, and it has been very well received by the clients because they were somewhat in the dark previously. They would raise a ticket, and it would go to a resolving group, and then they would just wait, whereas this way, they're more in the loop but without being swamped with the technical detail. It is just at the awareness level, but it has proven to be very popular.

We have built workflows that meet our needs via xMatters. They're important to us. They provide very good and very configurable automation. We've found them to be very configurable and portable. We can make a workflow for client A, export it, and reimport it for client B. If it needs to be customized, we make a few changes, and it is up and running for client B in next to no time. We found the workflows to be very intuitive, very powerful, and very well received by those who would benefit from this functionality. We've found it to be a real win.

We've done custom coding where required. Most of the time, our use cases are quite simple. Wherever required, we have done extra coding, but it has been minimal. We have a couple of webhook-type workflows, and we've added extra code in there to essentially filter. There are a lot of alerts coming out of a particular system, and we've added some custom code in there to only activate certain elements of the workflow against certain priorities. 

We were able to customize the workflow so that it is only for targeted incidents or particular criteria. It expanded the flexibility or functionality of xMatters. We were able to pick an out-of-the-box workflow and customize it to summarize clients only in particular trigger cases. They wanted everything captured but only certain things to be raised. So, we had to do an amount of coding in there to interrogate their initial methods, make the webhook do certain things, and make the workflow do certain things based upon the invalid data. We found that very easy to achieve. The customer was very pleased.

The automated callouts, without a doubt, are valuable. They have been a huge gain for our company. Previous to xMatters, there was no real management of the on-call resources or rotas. So, having that centralized and automated has been a huge gain. 

The support groups themselves are the most useful part.

It is incredible in terms of intuitiveness and flexibility of customization. It is an excellent product. It is very usable. We are the local administration within our organization, and with the tool itself being incredibly intuitive and the support being possibly the best I've ever encountered, it is a joy to work on. It is very intuitive and very easy to work on.

We've got some webhook-type integrations with standalone systems that we have from our various clients. These integrations were very easy to do. A lot of applications that you'd like to integrate with already exist as modules in xMatters. So, a lot of the work is done for you, or it certainly leads you through it very clearly. These integrations are very easy and very intuitive to set up.

We have used the REST API as well, and it was very good. We found it to be very powerful and very well supported in terms of the API endpoints. If we needed an endpoint that was missing or wasn't available, we were able to get that added easily. It has been very good.

The only thing that has caught us out a little bit is that on certain screens, you don't have the same admin options. There should be more consistency with the admin options because not all screens provide you with the same options. As an administrator, it feels like they should always be there. For example, on some screens, there is an Export button that provides fantastic, detail-rich exports, which obviously are very handy because then you can, as an administrator, do your administration, and extract what has been done to share with or prove to others. However, the Export button is not always present, and on the screens where it isn't, you miss it. You're like, "Oh, where's the Export button?", which can be quite problematic. There should be more consistency in the UI in terms of available options for anything that is referenced data or configurable. If you can put it in, there should be a way to run an export function to essentially pull it out. That's the only improvement that I can really think of. There is a little inconsistency, but I believe that has been simply explained to us. xMatters has been developed and redeveloped many times. So, different hands have touched it, and I guess not everyone thinks that an Export button is required, but we've certainly found it to be a very useful function.

It predates me, and I think we're into our third year.

It is near perfect. It is one of the most stable pieces of software that I've ever used in more than 20 years in IT. It is an incredibly stable platform.

With our limited experience, it seems to be perfectly scalable. You can make it do as much or as little as required. The ability to make those changes very quickly in a live environment is very good because if a new requirement comes in, we can turn it around almost as quickly as we can type. There are very few barriers to stop you from scaling as required.

In our environment, we have less than a thousand users.

Their support is exemplary. I would rate them a 10 out of 10 or even higher. In 20 years in IT, without a shadow of a doubt, it is the best support I've ever received from a vendor. They are so attentive and knowledgeable. They present themselves with such a friendly and family-based vibe or approach that they stand out from the crowd. You almost want it to go wrong so that you have an excuse to speak to their support. They are exemplary. 

I cannot speak highly enough of the quality of their interactions, whether that's raising support through the support links on the tool itself, or when we have a monthly catch-up call with Jamie Mallon. He always comes to us with tons of knowledge, tons of new news, and loads of warmth and engagement, and that's pretty standard. They do things in a very cool way. The quality of support that I get from them is very noticeable as compared to any other vendor I've worked with, bigger or smaller. The xMatters guys are definitely the best. They do things in a brilliant way, and for Everbridge, their new parent company, there is a lot to learn. They should be adopting as much of xMatters' style as they can because they really are excellent.

We didn't have a single solution. People were passing around spreadsheets, and we had a Lotus Notes database that some people could access to refer to the information, but not everyone. So, it was essentially just a mess. From that point of view, xMatters has just given a huge boost. xMatters is far superior in the way that it is highly configurable, and its features really support the actual use cases of an engineer. If an engineer is absent, they mark themselves as away, and if you have set the rotas correctly, xMatters will automatically schedule in a replacement resource. That's a very simple thing, but without xMatters, that was a very laborious and manual task for engineers. If they forget to do it, then suddenly, you don't find anyone on call. The way xMatters automates this is just far superior to the previous solution that we had.

It predates my time on the team. So, I don't know about the initial setup. 

Its maintenance is practically zero. From our side, we're primarily doing account creations as the talent pool of resolving engineers changes and shifts. We also configure any new workflow or webhook requirements that come through. We set up the groups and support users, but they configure their own rotas because we like to get them to own that side of it so that they can look after their own team going forward. We initially support them through the rota creations to make sure it is all set up in the way they need it to be operational.

This maintenance time varies depending on the demand. We've got a relatively stable take-up at this point. At its busiest, we were spending half a working week on it. At this stage, where we've got things configured and pretty stable, we are down to a very minimal amount of hands-on support that is required from our end, which is great. The system just runs. We're called into it when there's an issue or when there's a new take on of some kind, but for the majority of it, we're able to just let it run and do its thing.

Three people work on xMatters day-to-day. We're support engineers, and this is one of the things that we look after. We support it in addition to numerous other systems we all look after. We don't look after just xMatters. There is not a great deal of work for us to deal with on a day-to-day basis when it comes to xMatters.

I'm not involved with the numbers in that regard, but logically, we must have had an ROI because we've seen service gains. We've seen increased efficiency. It obviously passed in terms of time and cost savings across the board. All of our incidents are dealt with quicker now because the engineers are engaged so much quicker.

I can't really comment on the value in terms of comparison. It could be the most expensive product in the world. It could also be the cheapest, or it could be safely in the middle. 

It feels like good value in the sense that the service is excellent. The people above me who look at such things have renewed it a couple of times, and I think they would have thought whether it was good value, whether it was wildly overpriced, or whether there were better and cheaper alternatives. So, from that perspective, the pricing is fair and proper.

I would advise others to go for it. It is great. My advice would be to engage with the xMatters resources themselves because they will engage and guide a potential new customer very fairly. They won't oversell. They will get you the correct solution, and they will be very helpful in helping you to get that to work. So, my advice would be to go for it 100%.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. Nothing is perfect, and there is always room for improvement, but it is very hard to see where. This is an excellent product.

We have two instances of xMatters. One is for IT alerting, and one is for business continuation. 

We leverage our IT instance to notify different IT groups, such as system administrators or web developers, and then escalate an issue to a specific group.

We utilize it for disaster recovery to be able to send out messages to either the entire company or a more granular group of individuals, such as a specific location or specific departments.

We're able to communicate better with specific groups or offices. We didn't have that capability or granularity before. It has helped in that regard.

Automation of our incident notification process has increased our capability to respond. We can not only alert a whole group of people. We can also configure escalations so that one person is notified, and then it continues up the escalation if it is not responded to.

It has helped us to build workflows that meet our needs. It is important for us because it just helps create additional efficiencies. If we can configure workflows, that typically helps us be more efficient when there is an issue. xMatters workflows have helped us to address issues proactively.

The targeted and content-rich notifications have helped to reduce response times in our organization, but I don't have the metrics.

Its on-call schedules and streamlined escalations have helped to reduce Sev-1 incidents in our organization.

It has been useful for IT alerting and business continuation.

When it comes to customizing on-call schedules, rotations, and escalations, it is very flexible. There is only one thing that we've not been able to do, but if a capability is not there, you can always enter an enhancement request. They're very interested in what we're doing as a customer and what we're looking for. It is very easy to use and intuitive as compared to other similar solutions.

We have integrated it primarily with Jira. We use Jira for our help desk system, and then we can escalate a help desk ticket to a specific group of people for our IT instance. For example, if there was an issue with the server and a ticket was created, we could escalate that to our server team. The integrations that we have done were good and easy to set up.

We use xMatters’ REST API, and it is easy to use. 

We use xMatters logs as part of our operations. If needed, we do review the logs.

Additional built-in integrations with other applications would be an area of improvement.

I have been using this solution for just over three years.

Its stability is very good.

Its scalability is very good. We probably have about 20 to 25 uses in total. For the IT instance, it is our IT team that is using the instance. For business continuation, it is our HR team. We have plans to increase the usage of the product.

It is very good, but there is always room for improvement. Their support can be improved in terms of the initial response times and getting an engineer on the line. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

We didn't use any other solution previously.

On the IT instance side, it required preparation in terms of figuring out the groups of people to whom we wanted to send the notification. It involved defining and building those groups. On the business continuation side, it was primarily importing our user data so that we could properly communicate with specific locations and/or teams of people.

In terms of maintenance, it is a SaaS solution. The only real maintenance required on our side is to make sure that our end-user data that is imported into the solution is correct. We export our user data from one system. We then make sure that it is formatted correctly, and after that, we import it into xMatters. Its maintenance takes about 20 minutes per week.

We have seen a return on investment.

It seemed comparable or more reasonable than some of the other solutions, at least when we evaluated it. There are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Its cost is good, given the breadth of features provided by xMatters.

We did evaluate a few different solutions prior to making the decision to implement xMatters. We went with xMatters because it seemed like it had more flexibility and capabilities, and it could also be integrated with our ticketing system.

I would advise understanding what you're trying to gain out of bringing in this product, and when you do, be ready to get it configured. There is a little bit of lead time, but configuration and setup are fairly easy.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is to be organized. If you're using it for emergency alerting, then be ready for whatever your needs are.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.