Lunar Lander (Apr/May 2021) Release Overview

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.

hero-image3.png

We're celebrating this release with Lunar Lander, Atari's first vector-based game, which tests your dexterity at landing a lunar lander module safely on the surface of the Moon. But don't be fooled by its simple black and white graphics — this game's most difficult play mode realistically depicts the challenge of landing an actual spaceship. Luckily, if things are going really badly, you can always rely on the handy 'abort' button — which game creator Howard Delman fondly referred to as the 'save your ass' button — to max the thrusters, straighten the module, and stop it from crashing.

While our Lunar Lander release doesn't include an abort button for service disruptions, it is loaded with enhancements to support your incident management processes. Stakeholder updates, real-world incident metrics, easy-to-install workflows, and easier alerting are just some of the highlights. It also includes new ways to collaborate, resolver enhancements, and a redesigned user profile! Read on for details about all these great new enhancements, and more.

Before you dive in to learn about all the improvements, here are some important dates:

  • Non-production environment access: Tuesday, May 4
  • Production environment access: Tuesday, May 18 (enabled between 10:00-10:30 am Pacific)

Lunar Lander Training Webinars

For a guided Lunar Lander tour — including tips and tricks — sign up for one of our free webinars.

Sneak Peek

As a special bonus we'll also give you a preview of a couple enhancements we're working on that are coming soon:

  • Incident change triggers - initiate flows when the status or severity of an incident changes
  • User license types - support for 'Stakeholder' vs. 'Full User' license types (Base & Advanced plans)

Our Community shrinks images for convenience but allows you to click on them for a closer look. See an image or animated GIF you like? Click it.

Jump ahead

In a hurry? Here's an overview of this doc if you want to skip ahead to something awesome.

Incident management

Our incident management capabilities help you bridge your tools and teams, facilitate collaboration, and automate manual processes with ease — while also providing data to inform and continuously evolve your incident resolution processes. In this release, we enhance our incident management platform with new features for incident response and collaboration, updates for managing resolvers, and improvements to incident metrics and post-incident reporting — plus new incident endpoints for the xMatters REST API.

Incident response & collaboration

Communication is key to successful incident response and collaboration. This release, we've added new features to help you communicate with stakeholders, more effectively collaborate on incident resolution and manage resolvers, and initiate incidents even when you're on the go.

Notify & update incident stakeholders (Base & Advanced plans)

We've added a new section to the Incident Console where you can identify the Stakeholders you need to update as the incident progresses. Proactively updating stakeholders increases the efficiency of your incident response because it lets the resolution team focus on fixing the problem, rather than fielding questions about the incident status.

incident-stakeholders-plain.png

Send stakeholder updates

To build stakeholder updates into your existing incident resolution process, we've added an option to Notify stakeholders about this update when you change the status of an incident. You're able to add a custom message to the body of the email that's sent to stakeholders:

stakeholder-incident-status-update.gif

You can also send an update to stakeholders at any time by clicking Send Update in the Stakeholders section of the Incident Console. Whether you send them an ad hoc message or notify them as part of a status update, here's an example of the email a stakeholder receives, with the incident details that are automatically included:

stakeholder-message-example.png

Add collaboration channels from the Incident Console

In our last release, we made it possible to manually add collaboration channels to an existing incident, starting with Slack and Microsoft Teams. This is useful for workflows that don't automatically create collaboration channels when initiating incidents (such as the default xMatters Incident Management workflow). This release, we add support for other collaboration types: xMatters Conference Bridges, Zoom Meetings, and 'Other' channels. It's also now possible to search for existing Slack and Microsoft Teams channels.

xMatters Conference Bridges

To add a new or existing xMatters-hosted conference bridge to an incident, select Create new bridge or search for and Link existing bridge:

conference-collaboration-channels.png

Whether you add a bridge this way, or use the Create xMatters Conference step in your flow, the Collaboration section displays how many people are currently on the bridge, and you can click to view more information about who's participating:

conference-participants.png

If you use xMatters conference bridges as part of your incident resolution process, then you'll appreciate that we've also increased the length of time you can stay on a call before you're required to dial back in.

Zoom meetings

Estimated availability: Early June

To add a Zoom meeting to an incident, you have the option to either create a new meeting or link to an existing meeting by providing the meeting URL:

zoom-collaboration-channel.png

'Other' channels

Want to add a collaboration channel to an incident, but the product your team prefers isn't currently available in the Incident Console? You can use the Other option to manually add an existing chatroom, online conference call, or other communication platform to the incident by linking its URL. Once the channel is added, resolvers can easily link to it from the Incident Console.

add-other-collaboration-channel.png

Search for existing Slack or Microsoft Teams channels

We've added a new Search for channel option when you add Slack or Microsoft Teams collaboration channels to the Incident Console, which lets you search and select from a list of your existing channels. This is handy for connecting to your predefined MIM channels, or for incidents that escalate quickly and already have active chat channels before you get into the Incident Console.

Here's what this looks like for Slack (for Microsoft Teams, you'll need to search for a team and a channel):

select-slack-channel.gif

Resolver enhancements

For maximum efficiency and transparency, it's important that people involved in the incident resolution process can clearly tell who's in charge, as well as who's actively engaged in the incident. As you'll read below, we've added some great new enhancements to the Resolvers section to help make this immediately obvious.

Incident Commander role

The owner of an incident — the 'Incident Commander' — is now included as a permanent role in the Resolvers section of the Incident Console. This makes it very clear to the people involved who's in charge of the resolution process:

incident-commander-role.png

By default, the user that initiates the incident is assigned as the Incident Commander. If responsibility needs to be handed off, another engaged resolver can replace the current incident commander by being dragged into this role:

Reassign-incident-commander.png

Dismissed Resolvers section

It's now obvious which resolvers you've dismissed from an incident. As before, they appear grayed out in the Incident Console — and now they're grouped together in a Dismissed Resolvers list at the bottom of the Resolvers section:

dismissed-resolvers.png

Export resolvers 

We've added a Resolvers tab to the incident export to provide a more complete record of an incident's resolver activity. This is useful for supporting post-incident analysis, stakeholder updates, and for calculating the cost of an incident's response effort.

incident-resolver-export.png

Columns on the Resolvers tab of the export include:

  • Name - The resolver's first and last name.
  • User ID - Their unique User ID in xMatters.
  • Targeted - Name of the group a resolver was targeted as, if applicable.
  • Incident Roles - Any roles assigned to the resolver during the incident.
  • First Engaged - When the resolver first engaged in the incident.
  • Last Dismissed - When they were last dismissed from the incident.
  • Events - Event IDs of any events related to the incident that a resolver was involved in.
  • Engaged Duration (minutes) - Total number of minutes the resolver was engaged in the incident. 
  • Time to Acknowledge (minutes) - Total number of minutes from when the resolver was notified to engage, to the first time they became engaged in the incident.

See who's on a conference bridge

With our recent work on xMatters Conference Bridge collaboration channels, we updated the Resolvers section to display a phone icon next to the name of resolvers that are currently participating in a bridge associated with the incident. You can hover over the icon to view the name of the bridge:

resolvers-phone-icon.png

Longer conference bridge duration limit

Previously, if you were on an xMatters conference bridge for an extended period, you'd need to reconnect every four hours by dialing back in or having xMatters call you back to automatically reconnect. With this release, we've reduced the number of interruptions you'll experience on long-running conference calls by upping that four-hour refresh limit to 24 hours.

Initiate custom incidents from the xMatters mobile app

If you've built any custom incident resolution workflows, you can now enable them for mobile and use them to initiate incidents from the xMatters mobile apps. They'll show up as alternative options to the default xMatters Incident Management workflow:

enable-for-mobile.png

Initiate incidents from Microsoft Teams

Estimated availability: Early June

If your team lives and breathes in Microsoft Teams, then you'll be happy to hear you'll be able to initiate incidents in xMatters from Microsoft Teams. We're adding an initiate command to private messages and channels to launch a form you can use to provide details and initiate an incident in xMatters. Once the incident is created, you'll be able to post a card to the chat or channel with the incident's details and a link to the xMatters Incident Console.

Continuous improvement

Transparency of your resolution process and accurately representing its progression are fundamental for continuous improvement. To support this, we've made it easier to see who was involved in the post-incident review process and assign responsibilities, as well as to track the status of Post-Incident Reports. We've also improved our incident metrics to better reflect what happened in the real world, added a new metric for resolver response effort, and updated the Recent Events report to make it easier to find the events related to an incident.

Post-incident reporting

We've made several great updates to the Post-Incident Report builder to make it easier for you to document who's involved, assign follow-up tasks, track your progress, and share details with others.

Report Contributors

We've added a new Contributors section to the Post-Incident Report that lets you record who was involved in the post-incident review process. For convenience, any users engaged in the incident when it was resolved are automatically added to the list. You can edit this later if you want to remove or add other people.

PIR-contributors.png

Add actions from the Review tab

We've moved the + Add Action button to the top of the report so you can add action items from either the Review or Actions tab. You can also see the report and navigate between tabs as you're adding actions, which makes it easier to reference what you've written in the report and any actions that you've already created or completed:

PIR-actions-sidebar.gif

Report status

The report includes a new Status drop-down to set the status of a Post-Incident Report and let resolvers and contributors know how it's progressing through the review and sign-off process:

PIR-status.png

To track the statuses of your reports, we've added a sortable Post-Incident Report column to the Incidents list. This lets you see at a glance whether you've completed the post-incident review process for your major incidents. For example, you can use the Status and Severity filters to find all Closed incidents that are High and Critical severity, then sort by the Post-Incident Report column to see the reports with — or more importantly, without — a completed report.

To view a report's information, click its status to link to the Post-Incident Report builder:

incidents-PIR-status.png

Export as a PDF

The report export includes a new option to Print to PDF. This saves time if you don't need to make any formatting or styling edits in a word processor before you convert the report to PDF for distribution (and it's also helpful if you're not able to easily open DOCX files on your system):

PIR-export-to-pdf.png

Impact start, end, & duration included in export

To give stakeholders more context as they're reviewing an exported report, we've updated both the DOCX and PDF versions of the report to include the Impact Start, Impact End, and Impact Duration on the cover:

PIR-export-times.png

Editable incident metrics (detected & acknowledged times)

Want to fine-tune your 'Time to Detect' and 'Time to Acknowledge' incident metrics to reflect how long it actually took to detect or acknowledge the incident in the real world? You can now update the default values of these metrics for a more accurate representation of the incident:

update-incident-metrics.png

We've also updated the default Time to Acknowledge to reflect when the first resolver became engaged, or when the incident's status was updated from 'Open' to another value (e.g., 'In Progress') — whichever happened first.

time-to-acknowledge-timeline.png

Resolver response effort & time to acknowledge

The new Resolvers tab of the Incident export includes the following columns to help improve your incident response:

  • Engaged Duration (minutes) - reports the total number of minutes each resolver was engaged in the incident. Rather than assuming each resolver involved in the incident was actively engaged for the full period of time the incident was active, this metric reflects the actual time a resolver was engaged, when they were dismissed, and if they reengaged. This is helpful for compensation purposes and supports a more accurate estimate of the total incident response effort.
  • Time to Acknowledge (minutes) - reports how long it took for each resolver to engage in the incident. This can help identify barriers and opportunities to improve your teams' incident response efforts.

Find events related to an incident

Need to find the events related to a particular incident? Don't worry — you won't need to scroll through all of your events. We've added a new Related Incident filter to the All Events report that lets you easily search for events by their incident ID. You can also sort the table by incident ID by clicking the Related Incident column header.

all-events-related-incident-filter.gif

Usability enhancements

Usability is the central theme for every new feature or enhancement we add but also for making the things we already have in place even better. Here are a few of the usability improvements we've added to existing incident management features.

Include URLs in incident descriptions

Although you can use an Other collaboration channel to link to a URL in the Collaboration section of the Incident Console, you can also now include http:// or https:// web addresses in the description of an incident and they'll appear as clickable links right at the top of the incident:

incident-description-URLs.png

Timeline styling update

The incident timeline just got a little easier on the eyes — we've updated entries with icons so it's quicker to identify different types of incident activities as you're scanning through the timeline:

timeline-icons.png

Automation

A major goal of this release was to continue making it easier to get integrated with xMatters. We're talking workflows with easier installation, new triggers, simplified flow creation and alerting, step development improvements, trigger flood control, improved signal diagnostics, and more (if you can believe it)!

New installable workflows (& triggers, too)

In our last release, we kicked off an initiative to simplify the process for getting integrated with xMatters by making it easier to install and get flowing with our packaged workflows. Instead of having to download and import a .zip file, you can install these workflows directly from within xMatters just select the workflow from the list of available templates, and then click "Install":

datadog-install.gif

These workflows include new App triggers to accept the incoming signal, which is connected to a pre-built flow that creates an event (or alert) when xMatters receives a signal from the external system. When on-call resources respond to the event notification, they have the option to initiate an incident. You then have the option to use Flow Designer's powerful visual interface to further customize or enhance the workflow's functionality to meet your organization's specific needs.

We're rolling out this simplified process to all our packaged integrations. For this release, it's available for the following workflows:

blazemeter.png BlazeMeter
Automatically alert key on-call resources when BlazeMeter (formerly Runscope) sends a signal to xMatters about failed test results, letting your team initiate an incident and fix the issue before it impacts customers.
datadog.png

Datadog
Turn Datadog insights and metrics into actionable alerts to on-call resources. Responders can initiate an incident with the press of a button, or you can build on the flow to perform automated resolution tasks.

dynatrace.png

Dynatrace
Sends alerts when xMatters receives a signal about a Dynatrace Problem, including context about the problem, so the responder knows if they need to initiate an incident in xMatters.

pingdom.png Pingdom
Relay critical Pingdom data to the correct on-call responders so they have all the context they need to start resolving an issue before it can impact your customers. Responders can initiate an incident at the touch of a button.

New App triggers

We build our workflows using steps just like you, and as we build workflows we release the triggers and steps that support them for your usage too. That means you can take advantage of the following new App triggers to build your own custom signal handlers in xMatters:

Flow Designer

Flow Designer is the user interface for our integration platform. Its goal is to provide an all-inclusive visual canvas that allows users of any technical ability across the enterprise to integrate and create incident resolution workflows with ease.

Simplified flow creation

We're very excited to announce that as of this release, you no longer need to use a messaging form to build flows or send alerts in xMatters!

Create new canvases

In the past, you'd need to add a messaging form to your workflow to automatically create a canvas where you could build flows. This is an unnecessary step if you don't need to use a messaging form as part of your automation. To streamline this process, instead of first adding a form to your workflow, you can now simply go to the 'Flow Designer' tab (previously the 'Flows' tab) and click + Create Flow Canvas.

create-flow-canvas.png

Simplified alert creation

We've also improved the experience for designing flows that create events (alerts) in xMatters and send notifications. Instead of switching between the Forms and Flow Designer tabs to build out properties, forms, message templates, and responses to support your flow, you can now do everything from your canvas with our new 'formless' Create Alert step.

Events vs Alerts

You may be wondering why we're suddenly talking about creating 'alerts' instead of 'events' in xMatters. What we've historically referred to as 'events' are better described as modeling the behavior of 'alerts' in context of modern IT alerting and event management terminology. We've named the 'Create Alert' step to reflect this, and we'll be making other changes soon to bring the rest of our interface and internal references inline with standard industry definitions.

New & updated steps

As usual, this release includes several new and updated steps to automate processes, reduce toil, and bring actionable context to your DevOps and service management teams. We've also redesigned the headers of all our Flow Designer steps to improve the efficiency of step configuration and development.

Create an Alert

The Create Alert step is a 'formless' version of the Create Event step. You can use it to create alerts and send notifications at any point in your flows without having to create messaging forms and configure form properties. This is because the Create Alert step has message and response builders — plus device and handling & override settings — built directly into its configuration screens in Flow Designer:

create-alert-step2.gif

To trigger flows based on alert cycle activities (such as alert status updates, responses, and escalations), click + Activity Triggers below the Create Alert step on the canvas. As you configure the Create Alert step or one of its activity triggers, you have access to all the outputs from any upstream flow steps.

create-alert-activity-triggers.png

Sneak peek: Initiate flows when an incident's status or severity changes

Estimated availability: Early June

We're adding new Status Change and Severity Change triggers to the Initiate Incident step. You can use these triggers to run flows when an incident's status or severity are updated to specified values. For example, you could send a notification to escalate incident response when an incident's severity is changed to 'Critical' and close a service desk ticket when its status is updated to 'Resolved'.

To access these triggers, click + Add Triggers below the Initiate Incident step on the canvas. You can create individual flows for the change to each severity and status level of an incident. Outputs of the triggers include the old and new status or severity, the name and ID of the user who made the change, and the reason for the change (if provided by the user).

incident-trigger.png

Create a Zoom meeting

Although it's possible to add Zoom meetings directly from the Incident Console, you also have the option to automatically create these meetings as part of your workflow process. To do this, add the new Zoom 'Create Meeting' step to your flow and specify an 'Incident ID'. This associates the meeting with an xMatters incident and adds a link to the meeting to the Collaboration section of the Incident Console.

zoom-create-meeting.png

Create a Microsoft Teams online meeting

You can use the Microsoft Teams 'Create Online Meeting' step to automatically create instant meetings in Teams as part of your flows. An output of this step is a URL that users can click to join the meeting (instant meetings aren't automatically added to the calendar in Microsoft Teams). Like the Zoom step, if you configure an 'Incident ID' for the online meeting, it will be associated with an xMatters incident and appear in the Incident Console.

microsoft-teams-online-meeting.png

Updated Slack endpoint & steps

Estimated availability: Late May

We're currently in the process of upgrading and certifying a new version of the xMatters app for Slack, which among other things, will let you work with private channels. As part of this work, we'll be releasing new versions of all our Slack steps in Flow Designer — you'll be able to upgrade whenever it's most convenient for you.

'Alert Context' property in Event Activity triggers

The 'Alert Context' property in messaging is useful for giving users context about why they're being notified — whether it's because they were targeted directly, as part of a group, or by a subscription. This information is also useful for integrations and sending updates to third-party systems about why a particular user was notified. 

For this purpose, we've updated our Responses and Device Delivery event and alert activity triggers to each include a new property with the alerting path followed to notify the recipient:

  • respondedTo.by.alertContext for Responses triggers
  • notification.recipient.alertContext for Device Delivery triggers

Step development navigation improvements

The next time you build or configure a step in Flow Designer, you'll notice some big improvements, including the following:

  • View more of your step's settings - We've moved the step label, description, and the toggle to enable the step from the Settings tab to the step header to bring its configuration settings front and center.
  • Know where your step originated - A breadcrumb shows you which step or trigger your step is an instance of. If you're able to edit the 'parent' step, its name will be a link to its configuration screen.
  • Get more details, if you need them - Click the info icon to view who created the original step (and when), its description, and details about this version and who created it, if applicable.
  • Change versions - If other versions of the step are available, use the drop-down list to easily change to a different version.
  • Go full screen - Want to feel less confined as you're configuring your step? Click the expand icon to make use of your entire screen's real estate.

step-header.gif

Search for steps in the palette

When you're building a flow, you don't have to scroll the palette to find a step you're looking for you can search for the one you want! Enter your search term and xMatters will filter the list:

search-palette.png

Trigger flood control

We've added a new tool to your arsenal for reducing the amount of noise and interruption you experience when an incident occurs. Trigger flood control inspects signals for any duplicates that occur in quick succession and prevents those signals from triggering the connected flow.

For example, if a service issue occurs and your monitoring tool sends multiple signals to a trigger, flood control inspects those signals and suppresses duplicates for the same issue. This prevents the trigger from unnecessarily initiating the same automation and replicating activities for the same issue.

You can view information about the signals coming into your xMatters instance — including those that are suppressed — in the Signals report.

Specify flood control settings for a trigger

You can find the flood control settings for a trigger on the Flood Control tab of its configuration screen. By default, flood control suppresses signals from triggering a flow when they occur at a rate that exceeds four signals within 60 seconds. You have the option to send a webhook to a specific URL over the duration of the flood (for example, you can do this if you want to send a list of suppressed signals back to the source so the system can mark events associated with the signal as closed).

trigger-flood-control-default.png

Refine signal correlation

You can also optionally select outputs to refine how xMatters correlates signals to determine if they're duplicates. If you select outputs, only signals that exceed the specified rate and have matching values for the selected outputs are suppressed (for example, signals that exceed four signals within 60 seconds and have matching values for Alert Type and Event Priority outputs).

trigger-flood-control-correlation.png

View and manage your trigger flood control settings

We've added a Trigger Flood Control tab to the central flood control settings screen for your instance. This higher-level view shows you information about all of your triggers, such as the outputs being used to correlate signals, which workflow they belong to, and the date and time flood control last suppressed signals. From here you can enable or disable flood control for a trigger, or link to its configuration to refine any of its settings.

flood-control-central-config.png

Diagnostic tools

When you're setting up and managing integrations, it's helpful to check whether the signals coming into xMatters are being accepted or suppressed, to see the information they contain, and to confirm they're behaving as you expect.

Signals Report enhancements

Since our unveiling of the Signals report in our last release, we've added the following new functionality that we think you'll find useful as you're setting up and monitoring your inbound signals:

  • Refresh - Hit the 'Refresh' button to see the latest signals your xMatters instance has received.

signals-report-refresh.png

  • Sorting - A basic, yet essential function for any data table. You can now sort the report by clicking the head of columns which support sorting (Trigger, Received, HTTP Status Code, and Authenticating User).

signals-report-sorting.png

  • Search - Identify signals that contain specific search terms in the trigger name, its outputs, or the payload. (Pro tip: If you ever need to troubleshoot an event because something is missing or strange with its data, you can copy the event's Request ID from the Properties tab of the Recent Events report and enter it in the Search field of the Signals report to see what's included in the payload.)

signals-search.png

  • Filters - Refine the signals displayed in the report to those that meet specific criteria.
    • Date - Find signals that came into your system within a specific timeframe or date range.
    • HTTP Status Code - Look up signals based on their status code (for example, signals with status code values that are 'Failures (4xx, 5xx)' may not be formatted correctly).
    • Flood Control - See signals with suppressions. A 'parent' signal for which other correlated signals have been suppressed also displays a stacked icon in the report.

signals-report-filters.gif

  • Related incidents - The report includes a 'Related Incident' column to help you understand which signals initiated incidents in xMatters. The Incident IDs displayed in this column are hyperlinks to the Incident Console, where you can get more context about the incident.

signals-related-incident.png

  • Deleted triggers - When you delete a trigger or the workflow it's contained in, any existing report entries for signals associated with the deleted trigger are grayed out and display the trashcan icon.

signals-report-deleted.png

User experience

User experience is a major theme for many features in our quarterly releases, and this release is no exception. In this section, we'll review major improvements we made to our user profiles, as well as updates to our screens for managing company policies and settings.

Redesigned user profile

We've redesigned the user profile in our web user interface so it's easier to find and manage user details and settings for yourself and users you supervise.

user-profile.png

Design highlights include:

  • Fewer tabs help you quickly access pages you use the most, which also show the status of the data within them and prompt you to take important action:

profile-tabs.png

  • New Groups tab lists all the groups a user is a member of, and allows you to add them to new or existing groups:

groups-tab.png

  • Redesigned Supervised Users page to add, remove, search, and filter supervised users by their status or site:

supervised-users.png

  • Redesigned Supervisors tab to add and remove supervisors for a user:

supervisors.png

  • More Actions drop-down menu with the profile features you use less frequently:

user-profile-more-actions.png

Redesigned company & security settings screens

We're redesigning and streamlining the Company Details and Security Settings admin screens so it's easier for Company Supervisors to manage their most-frequently used company settings. Here's a look at the new design and the types of things Company Supervisors can do:

  • Upload the company's logo
  • Configure temporary absences to require a replacement
  • Set up an email display name
  • Configure single sign-on (SAML)
  • Update the company's password policy settings
  • Configure web session timeout limit (and optionally exclude reporting pages)

self-service-settings.png

Messaging

Messaging is a key part of our platform and every release includes improvements representing the feedback we get from our customers and the best practices we observe. This release, we follow up with some additional updates to our newly redesigned Messaging page, make 'starred' preferences consistent across our mobile and web platforms, and improve our SMS service range.

Filter by workflow, forms, & scenarios

In our last release, we introduced a new Messaging landing page that displays forms and scenarios in a full-screen list view. As follow-up on that work, we've added new filters for workflows, forms, and scenarios that make it even easier to find what you're looking for.

messaging-filters.png

Starred preferences apply across the mobile app & web UI

Any forms or scenarios you 'star' in the xMatters app for iOS and Android now appear as starred in the web user interface (and vice versa). In order for the stars to align, you'll need to update to a version of the xMatters app that supports this functionality.

starred-consistency.png

We've added a new sort order to the Forms and Scenarios tabs in the app that matches your preferred order of messages in the web user interface. To see this view, select the Default sort order:

mobile-default-sort-order.png

SMS provider updates

We always recommend the xMatters mobile app as a more reliable and robust method for communicating about critical alerts. But we recognize that SMS remains a popular notification method for some of our customers. To support this, we're changing our SMS providers to improve our service range and make it more reliable in some areas.

What's changing?

Some of the numbers you may recognize for your SMS notifications may be different. For more information about how to stay informed, see our article on Changes to SMS numbers.

Other product updates

In case all of the above just wasn't enough for you, here are a couple of other things we worked on this release that you might find useful.

All Events Report - filtering improvements

We've improved the filtering capabilities of the All Events report — you can now use the Form filter to select more than one form at a time. This makes it easier to view event traffic across multiple forms in your organization:

all-events-form-filter-multiselect.png

Sneak peek: Support for Stakeholder & Full User license types (Base & Advanced Plans)

Estimated availability: June

With this release, we begin adding support to specify user license types ('Stakeholders' vs 'Full Users') via the xMatters web user interface. This includes being able to specify license type with the User Upload, or when you manually add users:

stakeholders-add-users.gif

We're also adding a License Type filter to the Users page so you can quickly identify people by their license type:

users-license-type-filter.png

xMatters REST API enhancements

By popular request, we've started adding new endpoints to the xMatters REST API that let you retrieve information about incidents in xMatters, and allow you to add notes to them programmatically. For this release, we're starting with a few key behaviors and we'll build from here in coming releases.

Estimated Availability: Mid-May

Get incidents
You can retrieve a list of the incidents in your xMatters instance and use query parameters to search for incidents based on keywords in their summary, description, or incident identifiers. You can also search for an incident by specifying its request ID.

Get an incident
To return a single incident, you can specify the incident's unique identifier or incident number.

Add a timeline note
You can add a note to the timeline of an existing incident. The authenticating user who posts the note is recorded as the author of the note.

Early Access Program & feature delivery update

The goal of our current delivery model for xMatters On-Demand is to balance feature delivery with customer change management processes. This means providing visibility into upcoming changes for customers that want it, while allowing other customers to have a more standard non-production environment that matches production.

If you aren't familiar with the current model, we release features only visible to admins/developers at a faster pace than the quarterly release process. These features should not impact end users until a customer provisions them into their workflow. Customers can opt their non-production environments into the Early Access Program to see features and functionality enhancements that impact end users before they're released on a quarterly basis. All customer non-production environments are updated two weeks prior to official quarterly production release to allow for testing and training on new features.

We regularly reevaluate and improve our deployment processes to ensure they reflect industry best practices and customer feedback. For more information about our deployment process, see our On-Demand Deployment Process and Early Access article. We'll update that document whenever we make a change, and let you know about the change through other appropriate channels.

Learn more

These are the main features for this release but be aware that there are other small changes and enhancements we're delivering to keep xMatters looking sharp. Detailed information and instructions for using these new features will be available in our online documentation.

We hope you enjoy this release! See you again soon!

Was this article helpful?
0 out of 0 found this helpful

Comments

1 comment

Article is closed for comments.

  • The Lunar Lander release is now available in production environments.

    0