xMatters Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The on-call schedule that they have for groups is amazing in terms of how it works and how it triggers. You don't need to do anything. You just upload the users, and you have the calendar of the schedules. It is amazing how it works and how easy it is to work with this feature.

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

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

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

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

When you are not using the conference bridge from xMatters and you are using an external one, it is a little bit hard to get the person whom xMatters calls to jump directly to the external bridge. They need to hang up the phone and then get to the email to get the URL so that they can jump on the bridge. There is no direct connection from xMatters to that external bridge, but I understand that part of the business.

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

We have been using this solution for almost a year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I implemented it with xMatters.

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

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

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

I would advise others to ask for a PoC to understand the product to make sure that's what they're looking for. They should also check if they're going to use the text message feature and the calls. They should know how much they are going to use and if it is covered with their contract. That's applicable to most of the companies because that's an expensive service. 

I would also advise others to pick all xMatters trainings. There are three to four minutes ones. They help you to understand what you can accomplish from the application.

We have been using xMatters mostly to communicate and engage. We are going to use xMatters logs as a part of our operations. We're going to implement it for new applications. The implementation would start next week, and it is pretty simple. We're going to use email-based alerting. So, we only need to add the xMatters email there. The rest of the workflow needs to be added in xMatters directly. It is pretty easy because that application doesn't have API connections.

We haven't automated our ticket incident notification process because we have some challenges on our side, and we're still trying to get better at incident management. We're trying to change the culture before we enable that feature.

We haven't made use of coding to expand the flexibility or functionality of xMatters workflows. I haven't gone that far. We're mostly in the workflows and the flow designer.

It has not increased the application release rate, but everything has gone as expected.

The biggest solution that I have learned from using this solution is how to automatize the communication and engagement with the IT team to improve the mean time to resolve incidents.

I would rate xMatters IT Management a 10 out of 10. It is awesome considering the breadth of features it provides and the cost of the solution.

This solution integrates with the service desk tool to allow for the appropriate notification of support teams. You can set up a queue of people and you can assign their devices, their priorities, and the order in which they are called. It allows for shift work and it can all be automated once it is set up. If somebody has to be contacted then it happens automatically through the interface.

The system works by allowing for support queues, where you can define who is available and who is on-call. Then, based on ticket priority, you can define what kind of notifications take place. For example, if it is an urgent ticket or a priority-one incident, then you need to make a phone call. In contrast, if it is something minor for one individual, then it's typically going to be an email and that's the extent of it.

The automation provided not only expedited communication, and therefore the ability to address issues, but also ensured that the data used for communication is managed.

The most valuable feature is the automation because it reduces the demand on resources. It automates the escalation of a ticket if the person doesn't answer within a certain amount of it, and it passes it on to the next person. People are required to respond, for example, by pressing the one key on the phone to acknowledge the call. If it was an email then it would require a reply or similar type of acknowledgment.

Having this level of automation is a great benefit to being able to more quickly contact people. It reduces the amount of oversight required, and consequently, the amount of time to assign and get a response on a ticket.

The integration with other systems needs to be more flexible.

The interface is a little bit rigid and can be improved. For example, it tends to operate on the attribute of a record. So, if a group has a name, it tends to want the group names as opposed to, for example, the ID of a record. It creates a problem because if you rename the record then you lose all of the connections.

The data validation and verification need to be enhanced so that when data is changed, it reviews it in an automated manner and catches all of the anomalies. Otherwise, all you're doing is shifting the workload from an operational standpoint to an administrative one.

We began using xMatters IT Management in 2014.

PS, I am no longer with the firm and do not know if it is still in use.

This is a stable solution. This system runs 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and stability is not an issue.

This solution is fairly scalable. In the organization where I had this running, we were handling up to 150,000 incidents per month. There were 5,000 incidents a day and an IT staff of 1,000 people. I'm not sure if it would even be cost-effective in a smaller organization.

I would say that their support is above average, although not exceptional. It depends, in part, on who you were speaking with. However, part of the reason that we sometimes struggle with support is that we are outside of the norm for what is expected.

The initial setup was complex. The reason for this is that the interface is not as sophisticated as our needs.

The configuration is partly done in the service desk tool, where it gathers the contact information or it reads it dynamically. xMatters stores the method and the parameter for contact. As an example, if the method is to contact via email then the parameter would be the email address. If the method is a phone call then the parameter would be a phone number. You can set up other methods, too, depending on how sophisticated your environment is.

Implementing and deploying the system took six months to complete, including testing to makes sure that it worked.

The cost of this solution was less than the cost of staff required for the same job, so it is saving money.

This is a subscription-based, SaaS solution. There were some additional costs during the implementation because it was well beyond their standard configuration.

At the backend, this service is initiated internally, but the notifications and alerts are sent externally to the vendor through web service calls.

My advice for anybody who is implementing xMatters is to be sure that they have a very clear plan on how they want to process whatever communications they're doing. The tool can do almost anything but you have to come to the table with the process well-defined, before you being implementation.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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 no longer have to manage the notification process manually.

• The ability to notify teams and monitor those notifications in real-time.
• Time-based escalation of notifications helps us resolve issues much more quickly.

Some features that have been around a while could be refined or updated, in the same way other features of the product have been updated.

Beyond the typical grouping, xMatters has what is referred to as dynamic teams.  Dynamic teams are criteria for setting up and targeting a group of people that meet specific criteria. The good thing about this setup is that you do not have to specifically target a person, or add them to the team. If they meet the criteria that has been configured for that dynamic team, the user will automatically be added to that team, and receive the notification.

The bad thing about this setup is that you cannot alter those criteria through the typical xMatters import/export process. The attributes that create the criteria for dynamic teams can only be altered via the Web UI.  So, if you want to create a new dynamic team in a mature xMatters environment (one that is already populated with hundreds of users), and you want to add, say, 100 users to that dynamic team, you have to do it manually.

In contrast, if you want to alter a custom field, you can do so via import/export. But you can't have an unlimited number of custom fields, so in a large environment with a lot of teams, team provisioning becomes more difficult.

If custom attributes could be exposed to the import/export process, provisioning of these dynamic teams would be much easier.

Three to five years.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Technical support at xMatters is very responsive and knowledgeable.

There were some issues with user-adoption, but those have been mitigated over time.

Licensing varies widely, depending on usage. It can be cheap or quite expensive, depending on volume and features.

Put together a comprehensive knowledge base to help your end-users get acclimated with xMatters.

We have two primary use cases. One is alert notification and escalation. The other is major incident notification.

In the past, when there was a major incident notification, which is an outage for one of our products, we had one tool that we would use for email notification to our internal stakeholders, another tool for a voice blast going out to their phones, and then another tool for a conference bridge. All of those needed to be kicked off individually and managed individually by our enterprise operations center. It was very difficult to manually maintain call lists - who was on call when - and up-to-date contact information. So, when there was an outage, we didn't have the right people on the bridge, it took forever to get people on the bridge, it took us a long time to notify people there was an issue.

By using this tool, it's a one-stop shop. Through one tool, we're able to generate email notifications, voice notifications, mobile push notifications, Slack channel notifications, all managed from one place, simple and easy to use. People are able to join the conference bridge directly from the phone call by pressing one button instead of having to dial into a bridge and remember a conference code.

Everyone's contact information is up to date, people are able to go in and update their contact information and even set things like when they're going to be on vacation and who their backup is. 

It has dramatically cut the amount of time that it takes to get people assembled during a major incident.

Its ease of use and self-service are important to me. It's very easy for users to go in and modify their own contact information, for managers to go in and manage their own on-call rotations and shifts, so that is a very valuable feature to me. 

And the ability to notify and get everybody on a conference call, rapidly, is also very important. 

It serves as our communication hub. We're able to point all of our alerting tools at xMatters and have it route alerts to the right people at the right time. We're able to generate major instant notifications for product outages, get all of our people on the bridge at the same time, and include information from our monitoring tools with that. So everyone is speaking the same language and seeing the same information.

We're able to route those notifications not only to people, but also to other tools like Slack channels, where everyone can get in and collaborate.

While the documentation is good, the knowledge base - the collection of user supported community forums - is a little weak compared to some of the other products I've used. If I have a problem that I can't find the answer to in the documentation, there are very few places to go after that, because the user base, the community forums, are not strong for me to find someone who's had the same issue as me, and find out what the answer to their problem was. That's somewhat of a weak point.

Regarding issues with stability, none that I can recall. There have been some scheduled maintenance and downtimes, of course, but we've always been told ahead of time and have been able to plan accordingly. I honestly can't recall an unscheduled outage that we've experienced with the product.

In terms of scalability, there haven't really been any issues. We use the On-Demand version, which is the cloud version, not the on-prem, and we've never had any issues with the scalability.

Maybe, if there are a lot of people to be notified during a particular incident - if we're talking a couple of hundred people for instance - it takes a little while for everybody to get called, which I would expect. But I've never really thought about that as a scalability issue. In the end, everyone who needs to get notified gets notified.

I've used tech support a couple of times. I have worked with support before, to change permissions and roles that we don't have permissions to change, but mainly, when I do have questions about actual solution implementation, I typically will work with our technical account manager, and reach directly out to them and not go through support. And that's been successful for us.

We originally used a tool called AlarmPoint. We used it for about the first year and a half I was here. We were planning on punting it because it wasn't very useful, and when we contacted the team to tell them that we were going to not use their tool anymore, they said, "We're no longer AlarmPoint, we're xMatters, and the tool that you're using is years old. Why don't you see what our new tool can do?" That's actually how we were introduced to xMatters. So, we previously used an old iteration that was very outdated.

We also did use PagerDuty a little bit, which is a competitor of xMatters. And the reason we chose to go with xMatters over PagerDuty was that, while both were very good at alert notification and escalation, when we did our assessment, PagerDuty did not have the ability for the major incident notification process that we needed to implement as well. It's more just for alerting on-call people when there is an issue with the server, and not necessarily for assembling a large group of people, whether they be business, technical, management, on a bridge to actually provide information and collaborate.

It was pretty easy. It took a little while because we have a lot of products and a lot of different teams that need to be notified for different products, and a lot of different policies. The implementation wasn't difficult, it just took time.

I would definitely say it's worth the value. I wouldn't say it's expensive, but most people who pick xMatters are not going to select xMatters based on price. There are other lower-priced competitors that are out there. But I would say for what we're getting, it's worth the money.

We did evaluate PagerDuty, as I mentioned earlier. We had originally evaluated directly PagerDuty against xMatters, and we used each of the tools for about six months on a smaller scale, and ultimately we found that xMatters was going to be the right fit for us. That's when we really expanded the usage and bought a lot of licensing.

I would say, before you begin with implementation, you should really have a good idea of what your notification standards and policies are. Completely irrespective of a tool or technology, if your process isn't rock solid, and if you haven't really thought out your process and what you're trying to achieve, it's going to make it much more difficult to try to implement the product itself.

So before you begin implementation, really plan ahead of time. Understand what it is you're trying to achieve, understand how you're going to measure the success of the project, and have all of your standards and policies laid out beforehand. It will make the implementation that much easier.

I would say it's a nine out of 10. And to bring it up to a 10, once again, if the user community knowledge base forums, were a little better, and it was easier to find answers to some very difficult questions without having to engage our technical account manager, I would give it a 10.

• 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. 

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.

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.

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.