xMatters announced product advancements that strengthen an enterprise’s ability to deliver uninterrupted customer experiences across the organization.

New xMatters product capabilities include: a redesigned UI that brings workflows front and center; product advancements in Flow Designer, xMatters’ visual workflow builder, that extend automated workflows to monitoring applications and hybrid cloud environments; and step-sharing capabilities to promote the adoption of incident management across enterprise teams and tools.

“Every business today is digital and as a result, customer experience has become a key measure of any company’s digital transformation success,” said Troy McAlpin, CEO at xMatters. “The xMatters platform delivers embedded incident management natively into a software developer or reliability engineer’s workflow to equip them with the information they need and capabilities required to deliver uninterrupted customer experiences.”

“Teams are often burdened with toil that includes managing incidents, which presents the opportunity for an intelligent, automated approach to incident management,” said Doug Peete, CPO at xMatters. “Organizations are no longer just concerned with major incidents. They also want to know when an event that impacts their service is detected. To address this need, we’re introducing new types of interactions with monitoring tools and on-prem systems to better equip teams with the information they need to keep services up and running.”

“With its rich pallet of automated workflows, xMatters is not only accelerating the effectiveness of core incident management teams, it’s also helping to coordinate the widening variety of stakeholders, including developers and SREs, who are increasingly relevant to application service performance across the full lifecycle,” said Dennis Drogseth, VP, Enterprise Management Associates. “The enhanced auditing capabilities should also provide strong value in improving efficiencies and effectiveness across IT and development teams to enhance the overall customer experience.”

As the responsibility for customer experience extends to new teams throughout the enterprise, product, development, SRE, and IT Ops teams must be equipped with automated workflows that address incidents regardless of the infrastructure, monitoring platform or support tools used. To address this demand xMatters’ redesigned UI offers a unified view and dashboard to oversee end-to-end incident management workflow processes.

Additional product advancements include:

- New triggers from monitoring tools allow systems to initiate workflows and power event and incident management. Newly-added Flow Designer triggers enable any system able to send emails or webhooks (HTTP requests) to kick off workflows. These new triggers can work with enrichment steps to pull in change information from build and deployment systems and state information from other sources, helping bridge the gap between event management and incident management.

- Hybrid-cloud support for automated workflows help organizations manage incidents whether they are cloud-based, premises-based or somewhere in-between. xMatters automates toolchains that communicate with systems in the cloud, or behind the firewall using the xMatters Agent. The latest enhancements to Flow Designer allow the xMatters Agent to listen for incoming signals from monitoring tools, and when an event is detected, enrich the signal with data from local systems before initiating a flow in xMatters across tools in the cloud.

- Shared steps ease scaling and adoption of incident management across the enterprise. Steps act as building blocks for workflows. When a team develops a step, the sharing capability makes it easier and faster for other teams to adopt, repurpose and automate actions that may have been done manually before, driving consistency and repeatability in the incident management process throughout all levels of technical ability in an organization.

- On-call history reports empower incident commanders to audit and gain insight into on-call resources during an event. As more groups across the enterprise become responsible for maintaining customer experiences, even developers are assuming on-call responsibilities. According to the Modern Incident Management in the Age of Customer-Centricity research, nearly half (44.8%) of development team leads indicate their developers spend more than 50% of their time manually addressing incidents (i.e., any negative impact to the customer digital experience ranging from core service outages to degradations in performance due to servers, databases, load balancing or configuration issues). xMatters’ new on-call history report feature supports incident commanders, new and experienced, and helps ensure they are being accurately compensated for their shifts.

xMatters embeds incident management in more teams and tools throughout the enterprise via automated workflows and by accommodating the widening range of on-call responders. As a result, organizations are empowered to positively impact customer experiences and drive a rapid cadence of new digital service experiences.