Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This 30-second video shows how xMatters brings modern incident management to life using a single, end-to-end workflow.

Incident management can sometimes feel like piloting a spaceship through enemy fortresses while trying to hit as many targets as possible without, you know... game over. But, even if your response processes don't quite involve pixelated robots and laser beams like in the video game, Zaxxon, our latest release is here to make sure your feet stay firmly on the ground whatever incidents may appear in your stratosphere! Let’s take a look...

From managing issues and resources to keeping customers updated, resolving an incident requires a level of multi-tasking that can be overwhelming for even the most efficient of teams. Automating your processes reduces the time needed to diagnose, mitigate, and resolve incidents, and simplifies communication throughout an incident's lifecycle.

While on-call groups are the perfect solution when you need the right person at the right time to solve a specific problem, there are times when you need to notify everybody all at once. Whether you’re sending an informational message about some upcoming maintenance or an emergency notification about an issue that could affect an entire office, broadcast groups enable you to notify large groups of people at the same time. They can contain more members than on-call groups because there’s no rotation or escalation schedule to work out.

When an incident occurs, teams often perform a known set of steps in a specific order to help identify and triage the incident. For Base and Advanced plan users, the Incidents menu includes a Task Lists section where teams can build out priority lists for different incident types or use cases. For example, a list of failover tasks, or the tasks required to perform a deployment rollback. With task lists, Incident Commanders can be sure that resolvers know exactly what needs to be done to quickly resolve incidents.

Just because Flow Designer is a simple, visual workflow builder doesn’t mean that the flows you build have to be simple, too. In fact, flows can get very complex very quickly, especially as you connect more tools and create your toolchain. To help you build out and handle more complex logic and multiple paths, the Condition step automatically changes a flow’s path based on the value of almost any property in your flow. You can use the Condition step to compare values using AND/OR logic and a range of conditional operators to determine the appropriate path. And if the values don’t match, never fear!

Although not all incidents are the same, resolvers often need similar resources or follow standard processes when responding to them. To save valuable time and effort, teams who frequently reference or attach the same files when sending incident notifications can use the xMatters Document Library to store everything in one place. You can easily add and organize files such as screenshots, maps, or response plans and attach them to incidents from within the library or directly on the incident console. For sensitive documents, set permissions so only certain roles can access, modify, or delete them.

The Post-Incident Report builder is available to Advanced plan customers to help document the incident post-mortem process. This allows users to share key information and understanding about why an incident occurred, how resolvers responded, and what preventive actions can be taken to ensure it doesn't happen again. After creating a Post-Incident Report, you can share it with other colleagues or stakeholders to keep them informed about the steps you’re taking to mitigate and prevent potential recurrences.

Understanding how groups and users respond to incidents is vital to refining and improving your incident response processes. Our user and group performance reports help admins visualize the way people in their organization handle notifications for alerts and incidents. These reports can be used to review performance data over a specific amount of time, allowing you to clearly analyze trends and changes, and identify groups that may be inundated with alerts, or users who may not be available when expected.

Incident notifications are always time sensitive, so it’s crucial that teams and resolvers are set up to receive them. When an alert is sent to a group you belong to that uses failsafe devices, you can still receive the notification even if you don’t have any devices with an active timeframe. You can choose which device is used as a failsafe, giving you an extra layer of reassurance that you’ll never miss an important notification when it matters.