Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

To know how disruptions to one service might affect other services in your digital environment, it’s important to have a record of how applications and technical services connect within your architecture. Service dependency maps in xMatters define and visualize relationships between your services, so you can instantly see whether a service is impacted by any active incidents, and how that incident impacts other services. Dependency maps can be expanded to show additional upstream and downstream services and help identify a potential root cause.