Enduro Development Highlights

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.

Enduro Quarterly Release Details Enduro was released on May 14th, 2019. The Enduro release includes new features and enhancements for incident management, reporting, intelligent event management, and more. For all the details, see the Enduro (Apr/May) 2019 Release Overview. Next Release: Frogger (Jul/Aug 2019) We've already started working on our next quarterly release, which we've named Frogger. Follow the Frogger Development Highlights & Support Notes page so that you receive updates throughout the quarter on all of the fun and functionality we're working on.

Introduction

We're hard at work on our next quarterly release, Enduro, which will be rolling out in the Apr/May 2019 time frame. 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 Enduro 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 a feature in this article works, 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 On-Demand support notes. 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.

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Next Release: Frogger (Jul/Aug 2019)

This release marks the start of our work on our next quarterly release, which we've code-named Frogger. Follow the Frogger Development Highlights page to receive updates throughout the quarter on all the fun and functionality we're working on.

Note: The features and functionality of the Enduro release of xMatters On-Demand will be toggled 'on' in production environments on Tuesday, May 14 at 10:00 Pacific.

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Enduro is here!

The Enduro Release is now available in non-production environments. For a quick overview of the highlights from this release, be sure to watch our release video:

For more details about these features, and all the other great enhancements included in the release, don't miss our Enduro Release Overview.

Flow Designer: Zendesk Update Ticket

Availability: Now in On-Demand

We've just added a new built-in step to the Apps tab in Flow Designer that allows you to update a Zendesk ticket:

To configure this step, provide the Ticket ID for the Zendesk ticket you want to update, and the new field values. If you leave any input values blank, those fields will keep their current values in Zendesk.

Flow Designer: Additional event properties

Availability: Now in On-Demand

Each Flow Designer trigger includes a set of common properties about the event that you can use as inputs in subsequent flow steps. These common properties provide information to identify the event, its status, and any properties included in the event.

In this release, we've added four new properties to give you greater flexibility when configuring flows based on the context of the event:

• event.created - Date and time the event was created in xMatters in ISO-8601 format: 2019-01-15T18:03:16.580Z
• event.priority - The priority assigned to the notification in xMatters (LOW, MEDIUM, or HIGH).
• event.targetedRecipients - The recipients targeted for notification.
• event.initiator - The target name of the user who initiated the event.

For more information about designing flows and configuring inputs, see our helpful Flow Designer documentation.

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Flow Designer: Zendesk Create Ticket

Availability: Now in On-Demand

We hope that you've started taking advantage of Flow Designer for creating your incident management processes! If not, what are you waiting for? Flow Designer's drag-and-drop interface makes it so easy to create workflows connecting xMatters with your DevOps and IT applications.

In this release, we added a new Zendesk Create Ticket step to the Apps tab in Flow Designer. You can connect this step in your toolchains to open a new ticket in your Zendesk account:

Engage with the community!

Did you build something awesome? Do you wish there was a step for a tool you use every day? Please let us know by posting in the community - we'd love to hear from you!

On-Demand: Communication center Events widget sounds

Availability: Now in On-Demand

Do you work in a network operations center where several large screens display all kinds of system monitoring feeds, including xMatters events? Do you wish there was a way you could make it more obvious when an xMatters event comes in? If so, then you'll be happy to hear that we've enhanced the Events widget on the Communication Center dashboard with sounds.

You can now configure xMatters to play a sound whenever a new event is created, when a comment is added, or when an Event Flood Control rule is triggered to suppress events. To manage your sound settings, select Choose Sounds from the Events widget settings menu. This brings up the following screen where you can select a sound for each different event activity, and customize the number of times you'd like each sound to loop:

xMatters REST API: Get communication plan properties

Availability: Now in the xMatters REST API

We've just added another endpoint to the xMatters REST API. You can use this one to look up the properties defined for a communication plan:

• GET /plans/{planId}/property-definitions - returns the properties for a specific communication plan.

You can also use these existing endpoints to embed property data when you retrieve the communication plans in your system, or a specific communication plan:

• GET /plans?embed=propertyDefinitions
• GET /plans/{planId}?embed=propertyDefinitions

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xMatters REST API: Get form scenarios

Availability: Now in the xMatters REST API

Scenarios are versions of a communication plan form that have property values predefined for different situations. In this release, we enhanced the xMatters REST API with two new endpoints that you can use to programmatically look up the scenarios that are available for a communication plan form, and retrieve information about a specific scenario:

• GET /plans/{planId}/forms/{formId}/scenarios - returns the scenarios for a form.
• GET /scenarios/{scenarioId} - returns a specific scenario.

We've also updated an existing endpoint with the option to embed scenario data when you retrieve forms for a communication plan:

• GET /plans/{planId}/forms?embed=scenarios

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Mobile: View and add comments from the iOS mobile app

Availability: Now from the App Store

Wish you could easily stay updated on what people are saying about an event or join the conversation yourself - even while on-the-go? Now you can, because we've just added the ability to view and add comments to an event from the mobile app!

Here's what the new Comments screen looks like in the iOS mobile app:

Want to know more?
Click here for more eye-candy and a deeper look into how this new feature works.

On-Demand: User Upload updates

Availability: Now in On-Demand

We've made a couple of updates to User Upload functionality that we think you'll find useful:

• Easier to import your exports - We've eased up a little on the header validation for the User Upload so it'll still process your job if there's a column it doesn't recognize, or if your columns are in an unexpected order. This means you can now straight-up use an exported list of users as a template file, without modifying any columns before you import it.
• User & device summary statistics - We've added summary statistics and a new "Report" tab to the upload results that provide more detailed information about the number of users processed (added, deleted, or updated) as part of your upload job. This makes it easier to see your job results at-a-glance, and to confirm the upload job performed as expected.

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Integration Platform: Flow Designer

Did you hear about Flow Designer? It's the latest major innovation in our integration platform, and it's going to revolutionize the way you integrate, synchronize, and automate toolchains. See for yourself:

Awesome, right!?!

And, there's more great news: You don't have to wait until the Enduro release to get your hands on this bad-boy – it's already available in non-production environments! We'll enable Flow Designer in production environments when we officially launch it at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco on April 9.

For more details about the sheer awesomeness of this feature, see our introductory overview.

Enduro Quarterly Release

Obviously, we've already spoiled that Flow Designer is the flagship feature of our upcoming quarterly release – but we've also got some other great goodies up our sleeves. Here's what you need to know about timing of the Enduro Quarterly Release:

• Non-production environment access: Tuesday, April 30
• Production environment access: Tuesday, May 14 (enabled between 10-10:30 am Pacific)

Stay tuned for the complete overview of the features in the Enduro release, coming on Tuesday, April 30!

Mobile: iOS 3.20+

Availability: Now from the App Store

We recently released a new version of the iOS xMatters app, which includes the following updates:

• Need to manage events when you’re on the go? No problem! You can now terminate, suspend, and resume events from within the app – for single or multiple events:

• We’ve also improved the experience you’ll have when you drill into an event by introducing a new streamlined Event tracking report design:

• You can now tap a handy “Today” shortcut in the My Schedule monthly and weekly views to quickly return to today’s on-call schedule:

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On-Demand: User Upload job status notifications

Availability: Now in On-Demand

Have you tried our new User Upload feature yet? It's easier than ever to perform bulk uploads or updates of user information in xMatters - and, now you can subscribe to User Upload job status alerts so you'll always know when your upload jobs completed successfully (or not - boo!):

Sign me up!

From the Subscriptions tab in your user profile, simply select the User Upload: Job Processed subscription and choose what you'd like to be notified about. You can subscribe to all or only specific upload jobs, and you can be notified when jobs complete successfully and/or when they fail. For more information see Subscribe to User Upload alerts.

On-Demand: Deactivating "inefficient" SMS devices

Availability: Now in On-Demand

As of this release, if xMatters On-Demand is unable to successfully contact a user's SMS device 100 times in the same week, it'll be deactivated. (In an upcoming release, this will apply to voice devices, too - but, we'll give you a heads-up when that happens.)

Inefficient devices are bad news

What the heck is an "inefficient" device, anyway? Basically it's a device that xMatters is consistently and repeatedly unable to contact. For example, a device might not work because someone typed in the number incorrectly. Or, a device could be out-dated because the owner got a new number and never updated their settings. These 'bad' devices have a couple of trickle-down effects on everyone:

• If xMatters is trying to send you a high-priority notification and can't get through to your device, you're not being notified as quickly as you should.
• When attempting to contact a non-working device, xMatters uses time and resources better spent placing calls to working devices - and getting stuff resolved!

What's the solution?

Obviously, we want to be careful not to delete any devices from the system that are actively in use and are just sometimes hard to contact. But if we fail to reach a device - say, 100 times in the same week - it's probably safe to say there's a problem. (And by fail, we mean all attempts to connect to the device fail; attempts that don't connect at first, but succeed on a retry attempt are not considered failures.)

If we deactivate your device, its information will stay on the Devices page in xMatters, but it'll be marked as "Inactive" and xMatters will not attempt to contact it again. If you have an email device, you'll receive an email explaining the problem. You can then log into xMatters to check your device details. If you identify and correct the problem, you can reactivate your device and make a test call to ensure that notifications can now get through.

Integration Directory: ServiceNow 5.2.4

Availability: Now available for xMatters On-Demand

Just a heads up that the latest version of the xMatters application for ServiceNow - certified with Istanbul, Jakarta, Kingston, London, and now Madrid - is available from the ServiceNow Store.

For upgrade or installation instructions, feature and update descriptions, and a list of issues addressed in recent releases, see the integration guide here.

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xMatters REST API: Create an integration

Availability: Now in the xMatters REST API

Developers out there will be happy to hear about the endpoint we just added to the xMatters REST API:

• POST /plans/{planId}/integrations - creates a new integration for a communication plan

You can use this endpoint to programmatically create a new inbound or outbound integration in your communication plan, without having to log into the xMatters web user interface. Happy integrating!

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Mobile: Android 2.15

Availability: Now from the Google Play Store

We've just added your Mobile Device ID to the xMatters Android app. What's that, you ask? It's something that we hope you'll never use - but it's super helpful if you ever need it!

If the xMatters Android app ever crashes unexpectedly, you can quote your mobile device ID when you contact Customer Support. Our support engineers can use it to look up relevant crash logs and other information to get greater insight into what went wrong, and get your app up and running smoothly again as quickly as possible.

To locate your mobile device ID, go to Settings in the Android app and tap About xMatters:

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Mobile: iOS 3.19

Availability: Now from the App Store

A new version of the xMatters iOS app is now available. In addition to some minor bug fixes, we've made the following great updates to the Recent Events report:

• Email subject as event title. The app now displays the email subject as the title for each event (previously it displayed the form and communication plan names). This tweak is useful because the email subject is often customized with event-specific information (such as priority, system, location, etc.) that can give you greater insight into the type of action that's required.
• Name of initiator. The report now displays an event initiator's full name, instead of their username (and if you've configured an override display name, the report will display that instead). This takes the guesswork out of determining who the initiator might be, so now there's no more head-scratching about whether "jsmith" is John or Jennifer Smith!
• Styling updates. We've made a number of minor but eye-pleasing styling updates, such as better use of spacing and icons, to improve your overall experience using the report.

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xMatters REST API: Manage subscriptions

Availability: Now in the xMatters REST API

We've just added several new endpoints to the xMatters REST API that allow you to manage subscriptions. You can use these endpoints to create, edit, or delete your users' subscriptions the same way you're able to in the xMatters web user interface:

• GET /subscriptions - returns a list of the subscriptions in your system.
• GET /subscriptions/{subscriptionId} - returns a specific subscription.
• POST /subscriptions - creates or updates an existing subscription.
• DELETE /subscriptions/{subscriptionId} - deletes a subscription.
• DELETE /subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/subscribers/{personId} - unsubscribes a user from a subscription.

xMatters On-Demand: Create & edit event flood control rules

Availability: Now in On-Demand

Make sure you check out the updates we made to Event Flood Control in this release - as promised, we've enhanced the Flood Control interface with functionality to create and edit event flood control rules for your inbound integrations.

This means that if the default Event Rate Filter we implemented in the Defender release doesn't suit your needs, you now have the option to create your own rules. This allows you to customize the event properties and trigger conditions used for event suppression, as well as the settings for event flood control notifications.

For example, maybe you'd like to do more granular filtering and suppression, such as by alert type (e.g., network issues) or sub-system (e.g., to differentiate between Nagios and Zenoss alerts being fed into your Moogsoft monitoring system). Or perhaps you'd like to define different flood threshold parameters, such as >10 events with the same priority every three minutes for a specific communication plan. Or maybe you'd like to notify recipients every 10 minutes or 500 events that a flood is ongoing.

Required permissions
To create and edit event flood control rules for a communication plan or built in integration, you'll need the following:

• A role with permission to manage event flood control settings (this includes Company Supervisors, Full Access Users, and REST Web Service Users).
• Access permissions to the relevant or built-in integration.

Create a rule
To create a new event flood control rule, click the new + Create Rule button in the top right corner of the Flood Control page:

This opens a new configuration screen:

From here, you can define the details for your rule, including:

• Source. The communication plan or built-in integration you want the filter to apply to, and whether the rule applies to all the integrations in the plan, or to just a specific integration.
• Event properties. The properties xMatters uses to determine if incoming event requests are correlated. If incoming requests have matching values for the selected properties, the rule will be triggered.
• Trigger conditions. The rate you consider a flood, which is a rolling window of the number of events per time period (for example, 4 events within 60 seconds).
• Notification interval. How often you'd like to remind recipients that an event flood is occurring, by time period or after a certain number of events - xMatters will automatically send the notification for whichever occurs first.

Edit a rule
If you need to tweak the settings of an existing event flood control rule, you can edit its configuration settings. If you have the required permissions to do this, you can click the name of the rule on the main Event Flood Control page to link to its configuration settings:

If you don't have permissions to manage a rule, you'll see the rule listed on this screen, but you won't be able to access its configuration or enable, disable, or delete it.

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xMatters REST API: Get historical information for communication plans

Availability: Now in the xMatters REST API

It's now possible to use the xMatters REST API to search for historical data about the communication plans in your system. We've just enhanced the GET /plans and GET /plans/{planId} endpoints with the at parameter, which you can use to retrieve information about a communication plan at a point in time in the past.

For more information about historical data access and permissions, see Accessing Data in the online documentation.

xMatters REST API: Ability to edit or delete any group

Availability: Now in the xMatters REST API

We've added two new permissions to the REST Web Service User role in xMatters On-Demand, to give users with this role greater control to manage groups using the xMatters REST API. These permissions allow a user to edit or delete any group, even if they're not a supervisor of the group:

• ability.act.EditAnyGroup - allows a user to modify the details of any group
• ability.act.DeleteAnyGroup - allows a user to delete any group

This is handy, because it means you won't need to add a REST Web Service User as a supervisor to a group every time they want to update or delete it via the xMatters REST API.

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Integrations: xMatters Bot for Microsoft Teams

Availability: Now from Microsoft

The xMatters Bot has officially passed Microsoft's certification process!

As you can see in the screenshots above, that means you can now integrate xMatters with Microsoft Teams and do things like:

• Find xMatters groups by searching with one or more keywords
• See who's on call by displaying a group's on-call schedule
• Invite on-call members to a channel by sending an invitation to their preferred device

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xMatters REST API: Annotations now trigger outbound integrations

Availability: Now in the xMatters REST API

Great news! We've just updated the Event Comments trigger to include annotations (comments) added to an event using the xMatters REST API. Previously, outbound integrations using this trigger would only fire when comments were added via the mobile app, xMatters Inbox, email, and Tracking report.

Now, comments added to an event using the POST /event/{eventId}/annotations endpoint will trigger any new or existing outbound integrations using the Event Comments trigger. For more information about this trigger and what's included in the payload, see Event Comment webhooks.

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xMatters REST API: Get user subscriptions

Availability: Now in the xMatters REST API

We've just added two new endpoints to the xMatters REST API to let you look up information about user subscriptions:

• GET /subscriptions/{subscriptionId} - returns information for a specific subscription.
• GET /subscriptions - returns a list of subscriptions.

The subscriptions endpoint includes query parameters that you can use to filter your results. Here are some examples of how you might narrow down your request:

• All subscriptions Mary McBride owns
• Subscriptions Mary manages but others own
• Subscriptions that are shared with Mary
• Subscription names containing "ITSM"
• Subscription descriptions containing "DBA Team"

About the early access delivery process

As of December 2015, we no longer support delivery of new features into production environments using continuous delivery; instead, new features are delivered on a quarterly basis.

Our 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.