Integrated Properties

Spring is here at xMatters and along with the arrival of longer and warmer days, comes one of the many investments in our integration platform you'll see this year.

Integrated Properties are a new addition to the xMatters platform, allowing message senders to automatically pull data from external sources into their message content.

Our integrations have always provided this capability, but message initiation is usually automated and driven by triggers defined upstream of xMatters. This approach has been proven over and over again to reduce the MTTR (Mean Time To Respond) to major incidents; however, there are other situations where an additional, manually initiated message might be prudent:

A Service Manager needs to engage the on-duty major incident managers

An Incident Manager needs to find and assemble the resolution team

An Incident Manager needs to send up-to-date status updates to key stakeholders, including customers, partners, and executives.

An Incident Resolver needs to request assistance and collaboration from the on-call members of additional teams.

Imagine you are an Incident Manager and are responsible for making sure that a incident is resolved within a certain SLA. After a new incident is logged and assigned to you, you perform your initial triage and determine that you need assistance from the on-call member of the Network Operations team.

The Integrated Properties in this message form allow the sender to enter the Incident ID and perform a search in their help desk system to retrieve the Incident Type, Summary, Status and other incident properties.

This feature is powered by our communication plan builder and the xMatters integration agent.

As you would expect, this means you can use our drag-and-drop technology to define how you will search for external data and what will be returned by the search.

The Message designer then allows you to construct message content using any of the properties you entered for the search, the integrated properties returned from the external data source, or the properties that the message sender will enter when sending the message.

The integration agent takes care of all the heavy lifting and allows you to query systems behind your corporate firewall without having to expose those services to the internet.

Attached to this article is a sample integration service that will return sample data for the Integrated Properties definition seen in the screenshots above.