The information in this article is the intellectual property of xMatters and is intended only for use with xMatters products by xMatters customers and their employees. Further, this intellectual property is proprietary and must not be reused or resold.

Introduction

We're hard at work on our next quarterly release, Robotron, which will be rolling out in the Mar/Apr 2023 timeframe. Please follow this article and its comments to receive updates throughout the quarter about new features and functionality that we're working on for the Robotron release.

Customers interested in previewing new features before they're released can opt into our Early Access Program (EAP), which delivers new features into non-production environments as they're rolled off the assembly line.

We'll also use this document to capture highlights of additions and updates to our mobile platforms and the xMatters REST API.

Deployment Details

For more information on how features in this article work, click the online help links embedded in each topic. As with any of our Community articles, you can click any image or animated GIF to see a larger version.

Support Notes

For a list of additional changes made in each deployment that are not covered in the Development Highlights, see the support notes included below each highlight. While most features will be added to production environments as part of our quarterly releases, the support notes typically describe fixes, which can sometimes affect product behavior.

March 13-17, 2023

Incident performance charts

Want to find out if any of your resolvers are getting slammed by incidents and could use some help before burnout sets in? Are MTTA and MTTR trending down over time like you were aiming for? The Incidents tab of the Group Performance and User Performance reports include the following graphs to help you track trends and spot opportunities for operational improvements in your incident response:

• Incidents – The number of incidents the resolver engaged in.
• Mean Time to Resolve – The mean time from when an incident was detected until it was resolved.
• Mean Time to Acknowledge – The mean time from when the incident resolution process began until the resolver engaged.

Get details for an external incident associated with a Moogsoft incident

You can now use our new Moogsoft Get External Incident step to get the details about an external incident associated with an incident in Moogsoft. For example, you could use the outputs of this step to add a Freshservice ticket, share to Teams, or post to an xMatters incident.

Get the details of a Dynatrace problem

Want to get the details about a specific problem in Dynatrace so you can add them to a Jira ticket, share them to Slack, or post them to an xMatters incident? You can easily do this by adding the new Dynatrace Get Problem Details step to your flow and providing the ID of the problem you're interested in.

Support notes (week of March 13-17)

xMatters Internal Reference No.	Summary
COR-69935	Flow Designer - Activity Panel: Improved performance when searching for a specific request ID in the activity panel.
COR-67472 (SUP-25007)	Users - Import Users: Fixed an issue that caused file processing errors when the phone number field contained special characters before the number.
COR-69905 (SUP-25186)	Incidents - Export: Corrected an issue that prevented the export  from properly generating a file after date filters are modified then cleared.
COR-69818 (SUP-25172)	Flow Designer: Fixed an issue that prevented the Merge and Switch steps from working as expected.
COR-69740	Flow Designer - Create Alert step: Updated an upstream reference in the Create Alert step added for the Notify to Engage trigger.
COR-69795	Incidents - Incident Console: Fixed an issue that caused an automation to run when a resolver role was changed.
COR-69490 (SUP-25136)	Flow Designer - Initiate Incident: Corrected an issue that created duplicate incidents when the Create Incident button was clicked multiple times.

March 6-10, 2023

New default Alerts view

Based on customer feedback, we've updated the Alerts report with an 'All Alerts' view. As the new default view for the report, this view displays all alerts within the past 30 days (excluding system alerts):

If you'd rather not see suspended or terminated alerts, you can select the 'Active Alerts' view instead. Or, to view alerts that meet other specific criteria, you can create your own custom alert views.

Filter incidents by source

The Incidents list now includes a 'Source' filter that you can use to look up which workflow the Initiate Incident step that created the incident belongs to. This is handy if you're testing a workflow and want to identify the incidents created by your tests, or if you want to look up incidents triggered through specific monitoring workflows.

xMatters REST API: New GET /incidents query parameters

We've added two new query parameters to the GET /incidents endpoint that you can use to retrieve incidents that meet the following criteria:

• Incidents with specific impacted services – Include the impactedServices query parameter to find incidents that include any of the specified services as impacted services. You can identify services by their target name or unique identifier. For example: GET /incidents?impactedServices=API,47eb2567-38d0-40e5-8fbd-fa1f9e1454fd
• Incidents where a specific group is a resolver – Include the resolver.group query parameter to find incidents with a specified group as a resolver, regardless of incident status. For example: GET /incidents?resolver.group=Database%20Admins

Support notes (week of March 6-10)

xMatters Internal Reference No.	Summary
COR-69685 (SUP-25154)	Alerts Report - filtering: Fixed an issue to ensure the Alerts report table displays accurate results when filters are applied.
COR-68833	Incidents list: Corrected an issue that prevented the search bar from clearing invalid information when users clicked the Start Over link.

February 27-March 3, 2023

Robotron Quarterly Release

The Robotrons are coming! Here are the release dates you'll want to add to your calendar:

• Non-production environment access: Tuesday, March 28, 2023
  
• Production environment access: Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Keep an eye out for the complete Robotron feature release overview, coming on Tuesday, March 28.

Support notes (week of February 27-March 3)

xMatters Internal Reference No.	Summary
COR-68952	Admin - Custom User Properties: Adjusted property parameters to allow the minimum and maximum settings to use the same value.
COR-69490 (SUP-25144)	Flows - Merge step: Fixed an issue that prevented users from successfully merging the response properties of two valid triggers.
COR-67127 (SUP-25169)	Workflows - Activity Stream: Corrected an issue that prevented users from seeing alert details in the activity stream.
COR-68820 (SUP-25118)	Workflows - Message preview: Fixed an issue that caused users to see incorrect translations for supported languages when previewing messages.

February 20-24, 2023

Incident Insights: View details about suggested resolvers

Want to know more about the suggested resolvers in your Insights before you notify them to engage? The name of a suggested resolver is now a link you can click to view the info card for a user or who's currently on call for a group.

Do you have our new number?

Just a heads up that the Caller ID number xMatters uses to send alerts to voice devices recently changed. If you've configured xMatters to override the do-not-disturb setting on your voice device, you'll want to update it for the new number.

Support notes (week of February 20-24)

xMatters Internal Reference No.	Summary
COR-68789	Incidents page (user experience enhancements): Improved the layout, positioning and responsiveness of some page elements on the Incidents list.

February 13-17, 2023

Incident Automation trigger updates

When configuring an incident automation trigger in Flow Designer, you need to specify which flow trigger form you want to use with the trigger. This previously meant you would have to go back to the workflows tab to create a new form if you hadn't already created one. Now, when adding the trigger to your canvas, you have the option to select a form or instantly create a new form as part of the setup process. 

New Relic workflow updates

We've updated our New Relic workflow and trigger to work seamlessly with the latest New Relic features and workflows. If you already use a customized New Relic trigger or workflow, it should continue to function without interruption. However, if you want to take advantage of new New Relic functionality in your existing workflow, see the "Update an existing workflows section" in our online help.

Support notes (week of February 13-17)

xMatters Internal Reference No.	Summary
COR-68540	Groups - shift names: Fixed an issue that prevented users from seeing valid shift name changes unless they refreshed the page.
COR-68199 (SUP-25046)	Alerts report - messages: Corrected an issue that prevented messages from formatting properly when viewed from the Message tab of the Alerts report.
COR-68425 (SUP-25097)	Groups (performance enhancements): Improved loading times and responsiveness when loading a group with a large number of members.
COR-68213 (SUP-25077)	Sites - geocoding: Corrected an issue that prevented users from successfully geocoding addresses for their sites.

February 6-10, 2023

Mobile: iOS 4.21

The latest version of our iOS app includes the following updates:

• You can now 'Show more' of an alert's details to view priority, source, and other critical information at a glance.
• Pinch-to-zoom plays more nicely with your alerts and response options.
• Biometric login now requires you set up a screen lock for your device.

Redesigned Voice Recordings screen

Our newly redesigned Voice Recordings screen not only looks fantastic—it also improves the usability of managing and creating custom recordings for specific languages, locations, and situations (for example,  “Fire”, “Flood”, “Email server down”, “... in Building Seven”). You can also add custom recordings to override provided system recordings for things such as numbers, months, days of the week, etc.

Add response options anywhere in your email messages

Availability: Now in production

The Responses property for including response options anywhere in the body of email messages is now available in production environments! Read the full details about this enhancement here.

Support notes (week of February 6-10)

xMatters Internal Reference No.	Summary
COR-62965	Users - Supervised Users: Fixed an issue where a specific pop-up dialog box confirmation couldn't be dismissed.
COR-68270 (SUP-25073)	Groups - shifts: Corrected an issue that prevented recipients from receiving incident resolver notifications when part of both broadcast and on-call groups.
COR-68157 (SUP-25072)	Messaging - Combo box property: Improved the layout and positioning of some user interface elements when navigating the list of combo box properties.

January 30-February 3, 2023

Moogsoft Incidents workflow

Our new, two-way Moogsoft Incidents workflow brings a tighter integration between incidents in Moogsoft and xMatters! You can use this workflow to initiate incidents and notify on-call resolvers in response to signals from Moogsoft, and then update the Moogsoft incident as resolution progresses in xMatters.

New change intelligence workflow & trigger for Split

We've added a new low-code Split workflow to create change records so you can monitor the impact of Split features when they're toggled on or off. You can then build automations to update stakeholders, or send messages based on feature flag changes.

You can also take advantage of the new Split Alerts trigger (available on the Triggers tab of the Flow Designer palette) to build your own custom signal handlers in any new or existing workflow:

View incident performance by severity and impacted services

Want to get more granular with your incident performance metrics? We've added new Severity and Impacted Services filters to the Incidents tab of the User Performance and Group Performance reports:

You can use these new filters to analyze user or group performance for incidents:

• With specific severity levels (for example, only critical and high severity incidents).
• That impacted a particular service or services.

Filter incidents by resolvers

Notice any concerning metrics in your incident performance reports? Want to understand the details of the underlying incidents so you can help users or groups improve their performance?

To assist with this, the Incidents list now includes a Resolvers filter that makes it easy to look up the incidents where particular resolvers are engaged—or were previously engaged—as resolvers:

Support notes (week of January 3-February 3)

xMatters Internal Reference No.	Summary
COR-68093 (SUP-25069)	Alerts report - searching alert views: Fixed an issue where all starred views were included in the results when searching the list of alert views.
COR-68082	xMatters REST API - POST /services: Corrected an issue that prevented services from being properly created when the ownedBy field was included in the request.
COR-68005 (SUP-25049)	Custom steps - usage permissions: Fixed an issue that prevented successfully saved usage permissions from persisting when the canvas is closed and re-opened.
COR-67953 (SUP-25038)	Workflows - form layout: Corrected an issue that prevented the Save button from enabling after users add a valid recipient to the form.

January 23-27, 2023

Slack support for services & more

We've just released the following great updates to the xMatters app for Slack that you can now use in your incident resolution processes:

• You can now use the find, invite, and on-call commands to search for services, invite the owner of a service to a channel, or look up who's on call for a service.
• Results of the find command now specify if the result is a service, on-call group, or broadcast group.
• We've upgraded the details for groups to include the services a group owns, an easier-to-read escalation schedule for on-call groups, and a members list for broadcast groups.
• You can link directly from a service or group to xMatters if you want to see a service or group in more detail.
• The Initiate an Incident recipient field now organizes recipients by type, including services.

Support notes (week of January 23-27)

xMatters Internal Reference No.	Summary
COR-67593 (SUP-25008)	Incidents - incident initiation: Fixed an issue that was preventing new incidents from being created due to a collision with an existing incident ID.
COR-66882 (SUP-24968)	Login - resetting password: Corrected an issue that prevented users from successfully resetting their passwords after being locked out of their accounts.
COR-67268 (SUP-24987)	Flow Designer - xMatters Agent: Fixed an issue that prevented steps from successfully executing when authenticating through the xMatters Agent.

January 16-20, 2023

Redesigned Workflow Templates directory

You may notice the Workflow Templates directory looks waaaaaay more spiffy this week! With its new design, we've organized workflows into sections so it's clearer what's available:

• Basic Workflows – Quickly get started triggering alerts and initiating incidents, or build your own custom workflow from scratch.
• Workflows for Your Tools – Use one of our low-code workflow templates to easily integrate with a third-party tool.

We've also added handy filters that you can use to browse the available workflows by their type (for example, Change Intelligence, Monitoring, Major Incident Management, etc.).

Add response options anywhere in your email messages

Availability: Early Access Program

Want to make the response options for your email notifications more visible? With this latest enhancement, you can add response options anywhere in your emails and style how they look.

In the message editor, drag the new Responses property into the body of your email message. When you send the message, this property is replaced with the response options from your form. If you'd like, you can then use the editor's code view to style how the responses look using your own custom CSS.

Support notes (week of January 16-20)

xMatters Internal Reference No.	Summary
COR-67384	Incident Console - export : Fixed an issue that prevented incidents for French users from exporting correctly.
COR-66793	Post-Incident Report - export: Corrected an issue that caused users to see an error message instead of a successfully exported report.
COR-67545 (SUP-25019)	Flow Designer - Combo box properties: Fixed an issue that prevented proper processing of single combo box values.
COR-67215	Groups - On-Call groups: Corrected an issue that caused the "+" icon to disappear from view when multiple shifts with long names were added for an on-call group member.
COR-67296	Groups - Broadcast groups (usability fixes): Improved the layout and user experience when working with Broadcast groups.
COR-67334	Incidents list (usability fixes): Improved the layout and user experience when working with Broadcast groups.

About the early access delivery process

Customers can choose to opt their non-production environments into an Early Access Program (EAP )to see new functionality before it's released. If you're considering signing up for the early access program, there are a couple of important things to know:

• Enrollment in EAP can be turned on any time through a support request.
• Exiting EAP can only be done on quarterly boundaries (you cannot opt in and out between quarterly releases).

For full details, refer to the official On-Demand Deployment Process & Early Access article.