xMatters

Awesome Tool for notification

We use xmatters in our account to notify end users when critical tickets are raised and it has been very helpful. The tool works flawless, specifically after we moved to cloud. Love the design of the tool which is very easy to use.

Only negative thing I noticed is there is no proper way of reporting things.

For eg: if I need to pull a list of all on call person for a group or supervisors it's tough as we have more than 800 groups. The reports need to be improvised and allow end users to select the fields which they want in the report and few other options.

Get the right Support personnel involved, Right Now!

Our Company utilizes 2 integrations with xMatters. Control-M which not only allows on-call personnel to perform first level support from anywhere via the mobile app and direct interaction with Control-M to gater Output and take actions directly with Control-M.
We also utilize an integration with Service-Now incident reporting to get the needed support quickly for other IT problems outside of our batch processing enviroments.
xMatters enables the right personnel to get involved quickly and also provides direct accountability which our managemnt teams appreciate.

Room for improvement

At KARL STORZ it confounds us that we are not able to send notifications to entire organization without jamming the switchboards. There are also functionalities that need to be enhanced to give my team the ability to fully use the system, i.e., with a dynamic recipient list only the first ten names can be seen, not able to scroll through the others. This showed up when a common name was request and there was more than 10 of them and there was not way to confirm the correct one was included.

xMatters Review

I feel the product does a great job and has been very reliable. The organization has been great as far as informing their customers on new features and functionality. Where I do feel they could use some work is on their licensing model. I feel it is complicated to figure out their pricing model and they should address this as well as the product is very pricing if you want to extend it for "limited use" within your organization.

A solid conference bridge notification tool

xMatters fits the bill for our bridge notification requirements in support of critical IT outages. The tool is fairly easy to administer and is rich in features and functionality to accommodate customized escalation and delivery preferences.

Giant spanner for your toolbox

This is a great tool for use with an ITSM tool OR directly connected to your DCIM, BMS, or stand alone. We currently have this integrated with our ServiceNow platform and it manages our Minor and Major incident processes very effectively. Thier app is great to use, you can send, receive and respond to notifications. When doing ITSM right, xMatters is the choice you should make.

xMatters keeps our business informed

xMatters has truly transformed the way we communicate during critical business issues.
Prior to xMatters, our NOC team needed to formulate a communication notice and send a blast message to a huge amount of recipients which created a chaotic conference bridge which only added to the time required to resolve the issue. After implementing xMatters into our workflow this time has been greatly reduced and xMatters has proven to be a very effective tool in sending out a very targeted communication to only the individuals required to resolve the outage as quickly as possible. Thank you xMatters!!

Polished product (xMatters on Demand after 2.5 years use)

We have been using xMatters on Demand for around 2.5 years, migrating to it from the infrastructure version. This cloud-based service has been developed and improved by xMatters in this time, making the interface noticibly better and the product quality better.

We use the system to notify support staff in a small environment (up to 100 users), calling support groups via a number of methods.

Overall Quality
Apart from some initial issues with audio phone calls failing to deliver notifications, this is a service I can rely on and requires very little system administration. The integration mechanisms are resiliant and the web interface clean and easy to navigate.

Ease of Use
User experience is mixed - the look and feel takes some getting used to, but the web interface has a solid feel. There is wysiwyg feature to designing forms and panels which is extremely easy to use and connecting integration agents is painless.
Because there is so much that can be done outside the basic functions, knowledge of REST API and programming disciplines is needed to integrate data streams into xMatters (users, groups, schedules). Extended development of action scripts within the xMatters engine may require developer access beyond the standard web interface to use the underlying scripting language.

Features & Functionality
This is an (almost) infinitely extensible notification environment

Customer Support
Extremely quick and attentive. Comprehensive knowledge base and community web site.

Value for Money
The more functionality that is applied to the product, and the bigger and more complex the environment is, the more value is returned.

xMatters makes things easier

xMatters has made contacting on-call personnel a much easier process. Our company would use excel sheets for each department who had people on call. There was room for user error from not updating the excel sheet on the manager side to no reading the right phone number on the user side. With xMatters it take the hunting for the right team and number out of the equation. The users are able to search for the team they need and can easily message them using the built in messaging feature. Also, having on call individuals being able to immediately join bridges is a huge advantage. xMatters will continue to benefit out company in more ways when we integrate with ServiceNow.

Communications software

We use xMatters for both business continuity events and IT on-call management. xMatters has greatly simplified our on-call rotation planning and communications. We have found the tool easy enough to use that our 100 or so business continuity planners can use the tool to exercise their call trees and can utilize the tool to send targeted communications.

Couldn't run a support team without it

I manage a Service Desk supporting a large retail corporation. xMatters automates our on-call escalation process used to notify an individual team of an issue or to pull together multiple support teams into a single conference bridge. It allows us to get the right people on the phone right away and allows our support partners to control how they receive the notification (text, email, phone call, push notification). I couldn't imagine managing major incidents without it.

Easy to Administrate and Train

We've been using xMatters for over a year and I can say, as a company IT Administrator, that this application is very, very easy to administrate and support for my end users. The ease of administration and the functionality, as well as the User Interface, both with Web and SmartPhone App, are extremely easy to use. Most of my users would agree that it has helped with our Remedy notifications, especially for our Critical and High impact incidents. Making sure the right people are notified at the right time and on the right device!! I'm extremely satisfied with the application as well as the quick response from the xMatters support whenever we need it. Thank you!!

xMatters makes incident management comms easy

We have now been using xMatters for 9 months and have been impressed with both its functionality and its flexibility. The team that helped us to set up the system have been helpful, knowledgeable and responsive. The system has allowed us to create a number of pre-filled scenarios to send urgent comms to a wide variety of user groups and to easily set up holiday rotas.
The one area which didn't work well was the phone alerts where the combination of American and English 'voices' gave a disjointed feel to the message.
Overall I really like the system and would recommend others to consider using it.

Very Functional

xMatters is a very robust product and easy to use. It provides me with a tool that gives me the needed automation in order to save cost for call outs.

Very Great Product

I use xMatters on a daily basis as the SME for my company. The product is very easy to use and does its intended function very well. The best part in my experience is the very quick and knowledge customer support that I receive no matter the question.

My Review on Xmatters

Great experience with xMatters

I've been an xMatters customer for over 5 years now - used it while at my previous company and then implemented it at my current company. During this time I have seen great improvements with the features and integrations. The quality of the product is superior to some of the other's that I've seen on the market. Customer Service is more than just a support function, they truly work with you, providing guidance and help you build out a process catered to your organization.

xMatters Xperience

Generally, xMatters is an awesome tool it allows me to monitor job status and be able to define team's on-call rotation. However, I'm having some issue as to the ease of use of its tool, not that bad though.

First Cash / Cash America Review - Kevin Ownbey

I have had an overall great experience. The features and functionality of all of the software that we use is easy and friendly. Also is very informative.

Good enough

The layer is complex to configure, and Is not very user friendly, works fine but could be better if we can manage more setting to configure the shift rolls.

Deliver Manager

This is really an efficient and effective tool that helps to reach out to team and escalation contacts as we expected.

Pretty good

xMatters, on the whole, is a good product. The calendar view could use a little work. You really have to look hard to tell who is really on call especially if someone is doing a temporary replacement and they don't replace the person for their full shift. Other than that it work like it should.

xMatters is a nice alerting solution

We have been running xMatters now with positive results. The ability to create multiple alerting schedules, different escalation criteria, and different communication plans makes this a great tool to work with. The tool is very easy to understand, and easy to train our end users on. The team from xMatters has also been very helpful and communicate well.
However we have been desperately waiting to get the ability to put recipients on the subscription menu as an option. This will greatly help out our managers who want to be alerted as an FYI but not have to be directly placed in an oncall rotation for all of their groups. PLEASE make this available soon!
Thanks!

Unimpressed

I have no comment as to Support or Value, I am only a user. My Sys admin uses support, and I don't know what was paid for the product. As a user, I find the interface to be extremely confusing, even frustration. Even after I've figured out how to do something, next time I need to do it, I have to re-figure out how. Not intuitive. Also, the process to replace a person in rotation (say for a short vacation) is unnecessarily complicated.

Major Incident Manager

The response, prompt for the request. and able to solve problems in time.
it's very helpful toward dealing with the major incident.
reduce our time to find the right resources.

Thanks!

A great ally in our security

When we have had an emergency in the company, the most complex issues have been solved very quickly: between 30 minutes and 2 hours.

We have received notifications of incidents that we didn't really expect, so Xmatters has been a great help.

Also, the prioritization of notifications has worked great for getting the right technicians to take care of the issue and also their replacement.

Excellent tool for incident crisis management

Very productive, easy to use, no lags, 24/7 operational

Innovative

Vital tool for on-call support and gathering techs for troubleshooting conference calls

We use xMatters primarily as an extension to notifications coming from our ticketing system. We also use its form-based notifications to send out invitations to join a conference bridge for troubleshooting situations.

The integration from the ticketing system to xMatters On Demand (their cloud solution) was made difficult by the lack of a true outbound API from our old ticketing system. Regardless, xMatters has technical experts who were able to make it work. It took some trial and error, but the interface is based on Javascript so they were able to make quick code changes as needed.

Our technicians are able to login to xMatters and configure their own devices, and determine how they want to be notified, and even set timeframes for devices. The team leaders are able to define complex shifts and coverage times for our on-call groups so that the right on-call tech gets notified during the proper time of day. This includes the ability to configure schedules for users in different time zones.

There is a learning curve for the group "supervisors" to figure out how to set up the on-call shifts, but once they grasp the ideas of shifts and learn to use the calendar feature, it all makes sense.

We are also able to leverage the use of groups-within-groups, where one group of technicians acts as the triage team for multiple groups. This allows one team to handle simple incidents and requests, allowing the Level 3 technicians to focus on project and development work without being interrupted by simple service requests and routine incidents during the day, while still allowing them to be available when needed for after-hours on-call support.

We are also using xMatters form-based announcements, whenever it's necessary to send out a notification to a larger distribution of technicians, typically providing information about joining a conference bridge. We can either use xMatters' conference bridge or our own 3rd party conference bridges.

The forms feature allows us to build fill-in-the-blanks forms without having to write code. Also, forms can be saved with certain fields and drop-down selections already determined, creating "scenarios" that we can use over and over. We're still in the early learning stages of the forms capabilities; xMatters also offers integration capabilities that we haven't leveraged yet. For example, we should eventually be able to trigger messages that make calls to 3rd party systems using their Integration Builder features.

xMatters Alerts Review

OK, so the pro and the con are pretty much the same. Overall as a user of the xMatters notification system is was great, a network outage rolled in and we would hop on the bridge and start troubleshooting. An hour later management would hop on to ask for status updates. This isn't a complaint to xMatters but to management, just because you are on a bridge call mailing list doesn't mean you need to insert yourself and slow progress. Obviously this review is a bit of tongue in cheek, and the take away should be that it is a great notification system.

Simple and Easy to use

It helps us to send out the outage / general notification through mail/sms and also is of great advantage to prepare on call rosters

Excellent level of Customer Service

The xMatters staff continuously offers us a high level of Customer Service. When I have contacted Rennie Chen or the Support Team (Kim Jue, Jason, Wong) I have always received excellent customer service. They diligently work with me to resolve any issues and answer any questions I might have. They also explain to me in detail the resolution for my issues. When I contact this team of professionals, I know any issues I'm experiencing will be resolved in a timely and efficient manner. I have enjoyed working with this team over the years.

Bridge Call process has been the major impoact

Prior to gaining xMatters for bridge call processes, trying to get team(s) on a call manually was a very tedious process. Whether it was sending out a generic "high priority" email with bridge call details and hoping teams would get on, to trying to use a manual on-call list to contact users directly to join a bridge, the biggest improvement in the process has been xMatters ability to target groups and on-call users and get them on the call in an improved timely manner.
There are small improvements that could be added to the process, which has been suggested to xMatters teams and development. It takes a time to build and implement such features, but we are hoping certain features will be improved upon or added in the later future!
I do know there are other integrations which are available which we have not even touched on yet. As we continue the process and get integrations built and working in the later future, we do see the possibility of xMatters being even more powerful than we currently see.

xMatters is great!

xMatters is simple to use, efficient and effective! We began using xMatters for basic paging and messaging for specific departments and teams but have now evolved into automation and integration with a few of our essential tools like NewRelic, Nagios, and ServiceNow. We love the fact that how well xMatters has worked for us to the point we are looking into their BCM solution as well. We are more efficient, more informed, and have a much faster response time to incidents involving critical business elements. The staff is awesome! They are always on top of any questions or concerns we may have.

xMatters for alerting

Works Well in a Corporate Setting if you need Paging

The company I used xMatters with transferred our paging services here. It has a ton of useful features and is very responsive. Pages were sent quickly. Make sure you respond to pages appropriately or else you will be continuously paged. Just reading a page does not accept or reject it.

If you don't have your profiles set up right for how you recieve pages, you can be paged multiple times for the same thing on all of your phone numbers. It can get frustrating if you don't properly change it.

Great Customer support

The ability to just have users locate their xmatters notification email and then join the bridge off of that is great. We all know it can be a bit like herding cats getting the bridge information to the correct individuals in a time of crisis. Xmatters just does that and you don't have to worry if the proper people have been notified or not.

Very good tool

Very good tool

Ever expanding features, great customer support

I have been administrating xMatters for several months. It was very easy to learn, with very little training. End users can manage their own notification methods, while I am able to tailor the experience to their needs, so they know what to expect consistently.

xMatters support is always extremely fast in addressing any support tickets opened. Additionally, the product is always evolving, and xMatters is open to your suggestions for improvement.

Licensing can be somewhat costly and confusing, depending upon your needs. It seems xMatters is tailored for a high level, multi-directional notification process, with escalation and flexibility. And that is built into the cost. There is a much more simple notification process that xMatters is also capable of delivering, however the cost structure is not yet there if that is all you are interested in.

It seems xMatters is aware of this, and is gradually changing their cost structure to allow their customers to achieve the best of both worlds. I look forward to that continued evolution.

1st run at xMatters

Our install of the 1-way integration was very smooth. To setup and use the product was simple. Any questions I had were easy to locate through your support documentation. Our implementation of the 2-way integration has been a bit of a challenge. We allotted 100 hours to install the application in our lab environment, test it, and move it to our QA environment prior to installing it in our Prod environment. We are out of hours & just completed the QA setup. We have yet to address LDAP & SSO. So far everything is testing clean in QA.

xMatters On-Demand review

xMatters has been a great help to our company in achieving our SLA's for support call-outs and have always assisted us with our ideas for application support whether it be customization or plug-ins for 3rd party applications.

Great 2-Way Communications Platform

We have been using xMatters software now for 2 years. Having the ability to instantly contact available volunteers to resolve incoming rescues, has helped us to significantly improve our service to animals and the community. The support from the xMatters team has been fantastic, working with us to implement improvements and solve any issues as quickly as possible. We are planning a new integration project this year, which will further improve our rescue service and we look forward to working with the xMatters team to make it happen.

No doubts here.

We use xMatters for manual and automated notifications. The application and APIs are easy to use, portable, available on multiple platforms with all the necessary options for security and auditing. I rated value for the money four stars only because some of our users receive very few alerts but the licenses are based on based on the level of response needed and not on overall usage. Even so, the license costs are reasonable and we are definitely getting the value needed.

From a support standpoint, xMatters is a highly available application with very good notifications regarding maintenance, feature enhancements, etc. The support staff is top notch.

xMatters is great for incident management

The product was easy to setup, the engagement team help us to integrate two of our apps. The system works very well for our needs. Support is excellent, they jump on to issues raised in minutes if not seconds. The system is very reliable. My only wish is for better guidance and help in setting up some of the integrated products to do more than what is out of the box for those products.

On Call Made Easy

We have a fairly complicated OnCall Procedure/Rotation that most applications cannot handle to the ability that xMatters can. It was pain free to be setup in and the Android App complements the website perfectly. Easy to use, easy to customize, and a powerful tool.

xmatters MPG review

We are using xmatters for last 7 + yrs, we moved to Cloud solution in 2015 and found no issues, which were there for 'On Premise'. Customer and Tech support is excellent and Cust Relation Manager are very eager to help you. We are using xmatters for our critical Control M Alert function and so far our End Users are Happy.

Ease of Use and Administration

I am a software administrator, and this is the least "problematic" application I administer. There are plenty of tips and tricks for users, as well as videos for training, etc.

When you do have an issue - be it technical or user driven, however, these are probably the most responsive and helpful support teams I have had the fortune of dealing with. Thank you xMatters, you keep me out of trouble with my users!

My Xmatters Experience

We use this tool for escalations and paging of Incident and Request that are High Urgency and Priority, so Admin can be notified that a ticket has arrived that requires immediate attention. Xmatters works great for this. The one drawback to Xmatters I see is that it is difficult to customize groups to fit different shifts and needs over multiple other groups that may have schedules in place specific to those groups.

Great Customer Service Team

Great product, however, I think it is best used with people who have more IT and support skills, compared to those who are just starting out.

Page your support team easily

Simple user interface, easily customizable. My company uses it to setup on call rosters. We setup our team rosters based on shift and also set the device priorities, and it follows the complex rules . We love this product