xMatters Upgrades Incident Response Visibility

March 1, 2021

xMatters introduced new feature advancements designed to facilitate a data-driven DevOps approach to incident resolution. DevOps, SRE and operations teams can now easily create collaboration channels directly from the xMatters Incident Console, using Slack, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. New pre-built automation steps further streamline the incident resolution process so managers can quickly add notes and assign severity or priority levels to an incident. Because visibility into incident response processes is a key aspect of continuous improvement, xMatters also added the ability to monitor incident volume and severity over different time periods, and enhanced its Post-Incident Report with export capabilities to share insights with cross-functional stakeholders and guide blameless postmortems for continuous improvement.

“Competitive companies don’t want to simply reduce incidents and keep their services running, they want to do so while simultaneously releasing exciting products that customers will love. Traditionally, this has been a hard balance to strike—the faster and more innovative teams try to be, the more likely they are to break existing services or overlook factors that impact the customer experience in production,” said Doug Peete, chief product officer at xMatters. “Without the proper tools to support their desired velocity, development and operations teams are hamstrung dealing with technical issues that divert time and resources from core product initiatives. We’re excited to launch new xMatters features that automate and simplify the toolchains our customers use to manage the growing network of microservices underpinning every modern business, while empowering effective cross-team communication and collaboration.”

According to the xMatters research report Impact of COVID-19 on Digital Transformation, nearly a quarter of technical professionals said that siloed functions hindering collaboration are a critical operations challenge. The latest updates to the xMatters platform facilitate seamless collaboration for ongoing incidents, drive continuous improvement and automate processes to power an adaptive approach to incident resolution:

Facilitate seamless collaboration for ongoing incidents. Service teams can add collaboration channels like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Zoom conferences to an existing incident directly from the Incident Console. When a Slack or Teams channel is added, the specified name and description, plus a link to the channel will be visible to everyone working on the incident. These channels can be used to share up-to-date incident details for closer collaboration to resolve issues quickly and minimize the severity of the impact. This is also an easy way for incident resolvers to bring their favorite tools into the incident resolution process.

Drive continuous improvement. To improve the incident response process, a new “Incidents by Severity” widget can be added to the xMatters dashboard to monitor trends in the volume and severity of incidents over different periods—such as over the past 24 hours, the past 90 days or at specific points in time. Managers can also drill through to the Incidents view to explore a graph's underlying data in more detail. Additionally, new export options for post-incident reporting enable technical teams to share postmortem insights more broadly across the organization.

React quickly to time-sensitive incidents. When accessing xMatters on the web and on mobile, new functionality in the messaging user interface displays a full-screen list view to guide users to easily access their workflows, forms and scenarios. Incident commanders can find specific messages with the new search bar and ‘star’ frequently accessed forms and scenarios for quick-access to a curated list. Mobile users can also search forms and scenarios, and sort them alphabetically (ascending or descending).

Technology teams can take advantage of these new features to foster dynamic collaboration and automate complex workflows across disparate systems in order to deliver service resilience and drive continuous improvement.