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Ninja Quarterly Release Details Ninja was released on November 9, 2021. The Ninja release includes a new Service Dependencies map for managing digital service interruptions, feature enhancements for automating your digital and business response, and new reporting that seamlessly spans current and historical data to display all alerts in one place. For all the details, see the Ninja (Oct/Nov 2021) Release Overview. Next Release: Out Run (Feb/Mar 2021) We've already started working on our next quarterly release, which we've named Out Run. Follow the Out Run 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, Ninja, which will be rolling out in the October/November 2021 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 Ninja 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.
November 22-26, 2021
Hard Freeze
If you're wondering why this space has been a little quiet recently, we've been experiencing a "hard freeze" — and no, that's not another new weather phenomenon you've never heard of! We use hard and soft code freezes to ensure our customers have the most reliable experience during the most critical and busiest times of the year, such as the peak shopping seasons of American Thanksgiving and Christmas.
For further insights into our release process, see our new blog post: How We Deploy Product Releases at xMatters.
November 15-19, 2021
Support notes (week of November 15-19)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-42977 (SUP-23768) |
Notifications - alert details links: Fixed an issue where clicking through to an alert's details from a notification would return a blank page. |
| COR-42900 (SUP-23758) |
All Alerts report (usability fix): Ensured that information in the Messaging tab is formatted properly to provide a consistent user experience on the new All Alerts report. |
| COR-42852 (SUP-23726 |
All Alerts report - User Deliveries: Fixed an issue that prevented the User Delivery tab from displaying the full list of delivered notifications. |
| COR-42798 (SUP-23730) |
Users - export user list: Corrected an issue where filtering users by custom user properties resulted in an empty export file. |
| COR-42867 (SUP-23746) |
Scenarios: Fixed an issue so users with the appropriate permissions could create scenarios from a form. |
| COR-42847 (SUP-23733) |
Workflows - create an incident: Fixed an issue that prevented users from successfully creating incidents from a flow. |
| COR-40653 | Recent Events report (usability fix): Addressed some minor issues with positioning and layout when adjusting filters and sorting columns. |
November 8-12, 2021
Ninja Release
The Ninja Release is now available in production environments! For an overview of all the features and enhancements included in the release, see our Ninja Release Overview.
Ninja Training Webinars
For a guided tour of the release, including tips and tricks, sign up for one of our free workshops.
Support notes (week of November 8-12)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-42421 (SUP-23673) |
Voice notifications: Fixed an issue that preventing voice calls from retrying correctly after a call went to voicemail. |
| COR-41924 (SUP-23668) |
Scenarios - permissions: Modified scenario settings to ensure scenarios are accessible by users with the appropriate permission settings. |
| COR-42532 | Reports (cosmetic enhancements): Modified the positioning and styling on the All Events, Signals, and Post Incident reports to provide a better user experience. |
| COR-42111 (SUP-23245) |
Signals (performance enhancement): Improved system performance for incoming signals with larger payloads. |
| COR-40541 | Workflows - Flood Control: Fixed an issue that caused users to only see the first 100 flood control triggers. |
November 1-5, 2021
New Flow Designer steps
The following Flow Designer steps from our Ninja Release are now available in production environments (click the links for more info):
- Dynatrace Add Comment - Add a comment to an existing Dynatrace problem.
- Everbridge Create VCC Risk Event - Create a new Risk Event in Everbridge Visual Command Center.
- Everbridge Launch Critical Event - Create a Critical Event in Everbridge using an existing template.
- Freshdesk Alerts trigger - Trigger a flow when xMatters receives a signal from a Freshdesk automation rule.
- Freshdesk Create Ticket - Create a new ticket in Freshdesk.
- Freshdesk Update Ticket - Update the information on an existing ticket.
- Freshdesk Add Note - Add an internal or public reply to an existing ticket.
- Google Chat Post Simple Message - Send a simple text message to appear inline like any other chat message.
- Google Chat Post Card Message - Display a card in chat with sections, subtitles, images, and other widgets.
Support notes (week of November 1-5)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-42629 (SUP-23701) |
User interface - logging in: Fixed an issue where some users could not log in to xMatters due to conflicting security policies regarding a third-party application. |
| COR-41740 | Incidents - Conference bridge: Fixed an issue that prevented users from removing a conference bridge collaboration from an incident. |
| COR-42461 (SUP-23675) |
Supervisors - User permissions: Corrected an issue that prevented users with the appropriate permissions from editing a user's supervisors. |
| COR-42701 (SUP-23709) |
Flow Designer - Canvas: Fixed an issue that caused errors when modifying a step in an integration. |
October 25-29, 2021
Ninja Release Overview
The Ninja Release Overview is now available! It's your go-to guide to all the great new features and enhancements we've packed into this quarterly release. Ninja is currently live in non-production environments and we'll be toggling features 'on' in production environments on Tuesday, November 9.
Support notes (week of October 25-29)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-42112 | Scenarios - Response counts: Fixed an issue where the response count limit set on a messaging form was not displayed correctly on the scenario. |
| COR-40935 | Incidents - Collaboration channels: Corrected an issue that prevented users from saving changes to an existing generic collaboration channel. |
| COR-42313 (SUP-23380) |
Flow Designer - Activity Stream (usability fix): Adjusted the Activity Stream so steps processed at the same time appear in the order in which they were run. |
| COR-40726 | All Events report - Add users to a group: Fixed an issue that prevented users with the appropriate permissions from adding users to an existing group. |
| COR-38902 | Groups - Inactive users: Ensured that inactive users cannot be added to groups through either the Users or Groups pages. |
| COR-42358 (SUP-23660) |
Flow Designer - Create Alert step: Fixed an issue involving special characters in a recipient's name. |
October 18-22, 2021
xMatters REST API: Services
It's now possible to create and manage services programmatically using the xMatters REST API. Here's the new endpoints:
- GET /services - returns a list of the services in your system.
- GET /services/{serviceId} - returns a single service, identified by its unique identifier.
- POST /services - create or modify a service by specifying its name, description, and owner.
- DELETE /services/{serviceId} - delete a service, identified by its unique identifier.
We've also updated our Groups and Incidents endpoints to include information on the services owned by a group and the services impacted by an incident.
Support notes (week of October 18-22)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-42299 (SUP-23658) |
Integrations (performance improvements): Updated the integration platform to improvement performance of specific integration requests. |
| COR-42080 (SUP-23648) |
Recent Events report - searching: Fixed an issue where some users were unable to search the Recent Events report unless their role was an observer of all groups. |
| COR-41936 (SUP-23636) |
xMatters REST API - roles: Removed a legacy role from view that was appearing in certain API calls, but not in the web user interface. |
October 11-15, 2021
Ninja Quarterly Release
Don't let the Ninja release take you by surprise! Here are the dates you'll want to mark in your calendar:
- Non-production environment access: Tuesday, October 26
- Production environment access: Tuesday, November 9 (enabled between 10:00-10:30 am Pacific)
Also, watch out for the complete Ninja feature overview, coming on Tuesday, October 26!
Support notes (week of October 11-15)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-42074 (SUP-23651) |
Messaging - SMS Messages: Fixed an issue that caused line breaks that were added in the message editor from appearing when the message was sent to users devices. |
| COR-41644 | All Events report: Corrected an issue that prevented the search bar from properly showing applied search filters. |
| COR-38963 | Sumo Logic workflow: Ensured all documentation for Sumo Logic contains the correct payload information. |
| COR-41993 (SUP-23643) |
Post Incident Report: Fixed a time zone issue that caused the exported Post Incident Report to display an inaccurate header date. |
| COR-41932 | Flow Designer (usability fixes): Ensured proper error messages display when character limits are exceeded or when step names are reused, and adjusted some canvas elements to improve user experience. |
| COR-41709 | Flow Designer - Form Trigger step: Added the invalid configuration icon to Form Trigger steps on the canvas to indicate when no form is selected. |
October 4-8, 2021
Custom Links dashboard widget
Do you have training materials, runbooks, or other resources that you'd like to make available to your teams as they're using xMatters? We've added a new Custom Links widget to the Communication Center that you can use to add curated lists of web links to your dashboards:
Each widget supports up to 10 custom links, and you can add multiple widgets to any dashboard. When a user clicks a link, the corresponding website opens in a new browser window.
For more information about configuring and using the Custom Links widget, see our online help.
Support notes (week of October 4-8)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-41957 (SUP-23636) |
xMatters REST API - GET /roles: Modified the endpoint so the response does not include legacy roles. |
| COR-41880 (SUP-23620) |
Groups shifts - time zones: Fixed a time zone discrepancy issue that was causing shifts in a specific time zone to be one hour off of the actual time. |
| COR-41561 | Incidents - initiate an incident: Modified the engage resolvers process to better differentiate active and inactive users. |
| COR-39103 | Groups - Add a group: Provided a more accurate error message when the number of groups allowed by your plan is exceeded. |
| COR-41641 | xMatters REST API - POST /people: Ensured the correct error code is displayed when a request is missing mandatory fields. |
| COR-41652 (SUP-23591) |
All Events report - duplicate events: Fixed an issue to ensure the Duplicate button is only available for active events. |
September 27-October 1, 2021
Notify impacted service owners to engage as incident resolvers
We've made it even easier to request the owner of an impacted service to engage as an incident resolver. When you click on an impacted service in the Incident Console, the service info card now includes a Notify to Engage button that you can use to add the owner as a resolver:
To quickly check the status of service owners you've notified, click See Resolver to highlight them in the Resolvers list:
Monitor services impacted by incidents from your dashboard
The Communication Center now includes an Incident Activity widget that you can add to your dashboards to monitor incident history based on your incidents' severity levels or the services they impacted:
By adding Incident Activity widgets to your dashboard, you can create custom snapshots of incidents over different time periods, making it easier to visualize trends, pinpoint problem services, and identify opportunities for improvement.
For more information on configuring the Incident Activity widget – and using it to drill into your incident data – see the online help.
Support notes (week of September 27-October 1)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-41753 (SUP-23574 |
Groups - Shifts: Fixed an issue where people were added to a group when removing a shift member. |
| COR-41540 | All Events report (cosmetic fix): Updated the positioning and layout of some interface elements on the All Events report. |
| COR-41655 | Flow Designer - Activity Panel: Fixed an issue that caused the step log to show the current timestamp instead of the actual log timestamp. |
| COR-41627 | Your xMatters Plan - expiry details: Fixed an issue to ensure that users can see the expiry date of their xMatters plan. |
| COR-41539 | Post-Incident Report: Corrected an issue that prevented users from saving multiple notes on the Post-Incident Report. |
| COR-41396 (SUP-23568) |
Flow Designer - Flood Control: Fixed an issue that prevented users from saving the flow when a step had Flood Control enabled. |
| COR-39609 | xMatters REST API - GET /events: Ensured that the required object reference links are included in the response. |
September 20-24, 2021
Build better text messages
The next time you compose an SMS message for a messaging form, you'll notice that we've given the text editor a facelift! In addition to improved styling, you'll now see tips about SMS best practices and helpful warning messages when your content gets too long:
Get your step outputs in order
Wish you could reorder the outputs of your custom steps and custom triggers to bring the most important ones to the top of the list? Now, regardless of the order you created them in, you can drag outputs to any position in the list:
Support notes (week of September 20-24)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-41594 (SUP-23587) |
All Events report - filtering: Fixed an issue that prevented users from successfully sorting the report by targeted recipients. |
| COR-41507 | Groups - Edit User Devices: Ensured the Edit Devices redirect links for nested groups properly direct users to the Edit Devices page. |
| COR-41483 (SUP-23574) |
Groups - Shifts: Fixed an issue where removing a user from a shift caused the user's supervisor to be added to the shift. |
| COR-41448 (SUP-23572) |
Recent Events report - Report Card: Improved loading performance for the Report Card tab for events with a large number of recipients. |
| COR-41352 | Incident Console - Stakeholder Update: The Stakeholder Update dialog box will now display the correct status after an incident is set to Resolved or Rejected. |
| COR-41130 (SUP-23524) |
Flow Designer - Inbound Integrations: Corrected an issue where connecting an inbound integration to a Flow Designer step would not trigger the default form. |
| COR-41359 | All Events report: Fixed an issue that caused the All Events report to display an error when events have Dynamic Teams as recipients. |
| COR-41420 | All Events report - export: Adjusted the exported report to match the user interface by displaying times to the second, rather than to the minute. |
| COR-41195 (SUP-23546) |
Flow Designer - notifications: Fixed an issue that caused subsequent event notifications to be sent to only one recipient instead of to all targeted recipients. |
September 13-16, 2021
Mobile: Android 3.6 & iOS 4.10
With the latest release of the xMatters app for Android and iOS, we've made it easier than ever to re-notify resolvers who didn't respond to your request to engage in an incident. Just tap the options menu (the ellipses icon) for the resolver who hasn't responded and select Notify to Engage:
Support notes (week of September 13-16)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-41201 | Web User Interface - Login screen: Fixed an issue that caused users to encounter a blank screen when attempting to return to the login page after resetting their password. |
| COR-41200 | Flow Designer (cosmetic fixes): Adjusted the position of some user interface elements to enhance user experience when building flows. |
| COR-41078 | Flow Designer - Email Initiation trigger: Fixed an issue that caused a change to the trigger name to not display after properly saving. |
| COR-40645 | Subscription notifications: Corrected an issue that prevented some subscription notification recipients from using the link in the message to view subscription details. |
September 6-10, 2021
Initiate flows when xMatters receives a signal from Sematext
It's now easier to integrate Sematext with xMatters! We've released a low-code Sematext workflow that you can install directly from within xMatters. This workflow includes a pre-built flow that creates an alert when xMatters receives a signal from Sematext. When on-call resources respond to the alert notification, they have the option to initiate an incident.
You can also use the new Sematext 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:
Add descriptions to your step outputs
Now when you design a custom step (or when you make a copy of a built-in step), you can add or edit descriptions for its outputs:
This can help anyone using your step understand what information the output provides and why they might want to use it in their downstream steps:
Create dynamic response redirects
Response options in the Create Alert step now support constants and variables from previous flow steps — this means you can dynamically build URL redirects based on information in your flow!
Click "Show flow variables" to open a side panel with the constants and variables you can drag into the URL Redirect field (once you're done, click "Hide flow variables" to close the side panel again):
Support notes (week of September 6-10)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-41061 | Messaging- email message editor: Fixed an issue that prevented edits made in code view from displaying properly in the main view. |
| COR-41049 (SUP-23531) |
Flow Designer: Updated the behavior when a canvas can't be saved because two or more triggers have the same name so users can easily troubleshoot. |
| COR-40906 | Flow Designer - step versions: Fixed an issue that caused the list of step versions to disappear when selecting a version. |
| COR-41045 (SUP-23540) |
Flow Designer - exporting flows: Corrected an issue that prevented flows with multiple identically-named canvases from exporting properly. |
| COR-40893 | Messaging: Fixed an issue where messaging pages weren't loading properly for some users. |
August 30-September 3, 2021
Automatically add a collaboration channel to an incident
By automatically creating collaboration channels as part of your incident resolution workflow, you allow resolvers to get straight to work when an incident is initiated. But what if xMatters doesn't currently offer a Flow Designer step for your team's preferred collaboration tool? Rather than designing your own custom step to do the job, save time and instead use the Add Collaboration Channel to Incident step!
Like Other Collaboration Channels that you manually add through the Incident Console, you can use this step to add any type of channel that has a URL:
Customize your workflow's icon and add a documentation link
Want to make your workflows easier to find and use? When you edit any of your existing workflows – or add a new custom workflow – you can upload an image to use as its icon (like the crafty ninja below) and optionally add a link to instructions you've prepared for using the workflow:
Your custom icon makes it easier to find your workflow in the Workflows list:
And, any documentation you linked is easily accessible from the top of the workflow (right below its name and description):
Support notes (week of August 30-September 3)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-40984 (SUP-23529) |
Flow Designer - Custom Workflows: Fixed an issue where valid step inputs inaccurately displayed an error message. |
| COR-40662 (SUP-23455) |
All Events report: Ensured the report defaults back to the English subject for a message if there is no translated subject line available. |
| COR-38695 | Groups - Who's On Call export: Modified the exported report to show the proper message for users with no devices. |
| COR-40658 | Users - User profile (usability fix): Updated some error and warning messages on the profile page to be more helpful for users. |
| COR-38176 | Groups - Add user to group: Modified the user interface to prevent users without appropriate permissions from attempting to add users to groups. |
| COR-40784 (SUP-23425) |
Groups - Who's On Call export: Fixed an issue to ensure the exported report displays accurate escalation types for members involved in upcoming rotations. |
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.
Comments
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We've started working on our next quarterly release, which we've code-named Out Run.
Follow the Out Run Development Highlights & Support Notes page to receive updates throughout the quarter on all the fun and functionality we're working on!