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Space Invaders Quarterly Release Details Space Invaders was released on July 25, 2023. Take advantage of our redesigned on-call group calendar and schedules to make shift management (even across time zones) simpler, keep your teams organized and efficient by creating and managing incident tasks, clearly differentiate between your applications and technical services, view group incident performance data right from your dashboard, and more. For all the details, see the Space Invaders (Jun/Jul 2023) Release Overview. Next Release: Tetris (Sep/Oct 2023) We've already started working on our next quarterly release, which we've named Tetris. Follow the Tetris Development Highlights & Support Notes page to receive updates throughout the quarter on all the fun and functionality we're working on! |
Introduction
We're hard at work on our next quarterly release, Space Invaders, which will be rolling out in the June/July 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 Space Invaders 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.
June 26-30, 2023
Space Invaders Release Overview
The Space Invaders Release Overview is now available! It's your comprehensive guide to all the new features and enhancements we've packed into this release.
After customer consultation, we're extending the length of time features are in non-production environments from two weeks to four weeks—this allows a full month for testing and user training on new features. Space Invaders is currently live in non-production environments and we'll be toggling features 'on' in production environments on Tuesday, July 25.
Support notes (week of June 26-30)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
|
COR-75121 |
Alerts Report - Messaging: Fixed an issue that prevented the default message template in English from displaying when the message in the user's selected language was blank. |
| COR-74690 | Conference Bridges: Corrected an issue where messages that contain certain characters in their names caused the External Conference Bridge page to crash after the message was sent. |
| COR-75139 (SUP-25635) |
Incidents - Incident List: Ensured users saw all expected results when applying filters to the Incident List. |
| COR-75072 (SUP-25618) |
Groups - Who's On Call: Improved the positioning and style of some elements on the Who's On Call page. |
| COR-75157 (SUP-25615) |
User Performance Report: Fixed an issue that prevented users from seeing reports containing large amounts of data in a timely manner. |
| COR-74200 (SUP-25554) |
Alerts Report - User Delivery: Corrected an issue that caused users to see an error message when they searched in the User Delivery tab. |
| COR-74990 (SUP-25608) |
Subscriptions: Fixed an issue that prevented subscription owners from modifying the subscription after it is shared. |
June 19-23 2023
The Space Invaders Release Overview will be available tomorrow!
Watch this space for the Space Invaders Release Overview, coming tomorrow, June 27 at 10am Pacific!
Create risk event subcategories
The Everbridge Create Risk Event step now supports subcategories, which enables you to add more detailed categorization of risk events in Visual Command Center.
Support notes (week of June 19-23)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-74245 | Flow Designer - Activity Panel: Fixed an issue where it was possible to attempt to view the logs for a deleted step in the Activity Panel, resulting in an error message. |
| COR-73027 | Workflows - Endpoints: Fixed an issue where attempting to trigger an integration with an inactive user would return the wrong error message. |
| COR-74824 (SUP-25602) |
Groups - Members list: Fixed an issue where the Members list would only display the first 100 members, even if there were more than 100 members in the group. |
| COR-74422 | Flow Designer - email triggers: Email trigger steps should now properly prevent users from attempting to assign the same Trigger ID to multiple triggers. |
June 12-16, 2023
Automatically add stakeholders to an incident
We've released a new Add Stakeholders to Incident step that you can use as part of your flows:
This can save you time during the incident resolution process—rather than manually adding specific stakeholders throughout the lifecycle of an incident, you can use this step to automatically add them while you focus on other tasks:
Support notes (week of June 12-16)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-74739 | Workflows - Forms and Scenarios - Recipients: Ensured the Select All/Deselect All checkbox on the Recipients modal works as designed. |
| COR-73721 (SUP-25486) |
Workflows - Endpoints: Corrected an issue that caused endpoints to appear twice for certain workflows. |
| COR-74684 |
Alerts Report - filtering: Ensured the Alerts Report displayed accurate results when filter searches contain white spaces. |
| COR-74576 |
Incidents - Export: Fixed an issue that prevented users from successfully exporting an incident after it was linked to another incident. |
June 5-9, 2023
Incident management usability improvements
We've added the following enhancements to the Incident Console that make it easier to engage resolvers and manage incidents:
- Find services more easily – The Recipients and Resolvers selectors—as well as the Impacted Services section of the Incident Console—now search on service description as well as name. This makes it easier to find services when you know what they're for, but don't know their exact name.
- Preemptively avoid notification failures – The Recipients and Resolvers selectors now warn you when a user has no active devices, a group has no members, or a service has no owner. This means you'll know in advance when a notification will fail so you can fix the issue or contact someone else.
- Troubleshoot resolver notifications – Timeline entries for notifying resolvers now include links to their underlying alerts so you can more quickly troubleshoot notification issues.
- Keep Stakeholder users informed – You can now select Stakeholder users as recipients in automations. This is helpful for updating people in your organization with Stakeholder user licenses who don't quite fit the built-in incident stakeholder updates.
- See what you need, when you need it – You can now collapse sections of the Incident Console when they aren't needed to better focus on the sections that you need in the moment, such as Resolvers or the Timeline.
Notifications report: New columns & filter
We've added two new columns to the Notifications report to help you track notification performance. You can use the Time to Deliver and Time to First Response columns to see exactly how long it took for notifications to be delivered to a recipient and how long it took them to respond after they received it.
The report also features a new 'Include System Alerts' check box. If you don't want system alerts included, you can clear this check box to filter them from the data displayed in the charts and table.
Early Access features now available in production
The following features we announced for the Early Access Program are now live in production environments (click the following links for more info):
- Notifications report charts: 'Notifications by Source' and 'Notifications by Device Type'
- User Performance report: 'After-Hours Alerts' metric
- See the SMS messages included in your alerts
Support notes (week of June 5-9)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-74507 (SUP-25588) |
Flow Designer - Conference Bridges: Fixed an issue where attempting to launch a conference bridge from a flow would fail with a 409 error. |
| COR-74468 (SUP-25572) |
Workflows - Scenarios: Corrected an issue where the edit modal for List properties appeared behind the scenario modal, making it inaccessible to users. |
| COR-74380 (SUP-25575) |
Post-Incident Report - export: Fixed an issue that prevented users from successfully exporting the report if the timeline contained entries with the Notified status. |
| COR-74403 (SUP-25570) |
Workflows - Scenario Permissions: Corrected an issue that prevented users from scrolling through all available search results on the Scenario Permissions screen. |
| COR-74352 (SUP-25506) |
Workflows - Form Layout - Email Messages: Fixed an issue that prevented changes from correctly saving when users moved between code and editor views. |
| COR-74210 | Workflows - Conference Bridges: Corrected an issue that prevented users from clearing the Description and Dial After Bridge Number fields. |
| COR-74427 (SUP-25580) |
Alerts View: Fixed an issue that prevented saved Alerts views from keeping their specified column order when users switched between views. |
May 29-June 2, 2023
Space Invaders Quarterly Release
Get your laser cannons ready, because the Space Invaders release is almost here! After customer consultation, we're extending the length of time features are in non-production environments from two weeks to four weeks—this allows a full month for testing and user training on new features.
These are the dates you'll want to mark on your calendar:
- Non-production environment access: Tuesday, June 27, 2023
- Production environment access: Tuesday, July 25, 2023
Keep an eye out for the complete Space Invaders feature release overview, coming on Tuesday, June 27.
Support notes (week of May 29-June 2)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-74075 (SUP-25541) |
Admin - Regional Settings: Fixed an issue where users attempting to delete a time zone saw an inaccurate error message. |
| COR-73840 | Messaging - Site Recipients: Corrected an issue that caused site recipients to be counted twice on the map after editing the underlying form layout. |
| COR-74147 (SUP-25531) |
Messaging - xMatters Mobile App (iOS/Android): Fixed an issue that prevented users from sending a valid form through the xMatters Mobile App on either iOS or Android. |
| COR-74144 (SUP-25538) |
Subscriptions: Corrected an issue that prevented users from seeing the subscriptions they own. |
| COR-74029 (SUP-25503) |
Groups - Copy Group: Fixed an issue that prevented users from successfully copying a valid group. |
May 22-26, 2023
Convert a group
The functionality to convert group types we added in our Robotron Release is now available for On-Call and Broadcast groups!
Convert Broadcast to On-Call
If you have a Broadcast group and decide you'd like to add shifts, escalations, and rotations, converting it to an On-Call group lets you add these features while keeping your roster, services, and other group settings intact.
Convert On-Call to Broadcast
On-call groups are designed to notify primary on-call resources first before escalating to other group members. So, if you have a large on-call group with escalations and you want to quickly notify everyone in the group about an issue, it's more efficient to convert it to a Broadcast group. (You can always copy the group first if you'd like to have both an On-Call and Broadcast version of the group for different purposes).
A few important things to note about converting groups:
- To convert an On-Call group to a Broadcast group, the group must contain no shifts (or just the default 24x7 shift), and no escalations or rotations. Once converted, scheduling options are no longer available, and all members of the Broadcast group are notified at the same time.
- Converting a Broadcast group to an On-Call group adds all members to a default 24x7 shift. You can then create a shift schedule with escalations to notify primary on-call responders first, and then rotate responsibility.
- Converting a Broadcast group to an On-Call group is available for groups with up to 200 members.
Support notes (week of May 22-26)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-73738 | Groups - Scheduling: The confirmation message for setting delays between users now automatically closes. |
| COR-73855 | Groups - Admins: Fixed screen flickering when adding or selecting/deselecting all Group Admins. |
| COR-73854 | Groups - Calendar: Day view now automatically refreshes after making edits on the Shifts tab. |
| COR-73665 | Groups - Copying: Errors now display more accurate information when attempting to copy groups without appropriate permissions. |
| COR-73705 | Incidents - Incident Console: Inactive users and groups now appear struck-through in the Resolvers list. |
| COR-73015 | Incidents List (cosmetic fix): The entire border of the check box to select all incidents is now displayed. |
| COR-73014 | Incidents - Linked Incidents: Fixed an issue preventing incidents from displaying when linked in the Post Incident Report. |
| COR-71394 | Flow Designer (cosmetic fix): The names of Create Alert Using a Form steps are now properly truncated. |
|
COR-73053 |
Flow Designer (cosmetic fix): Appropriate information is properly displayed and aligned on Initiate Incident and Automation trigger configuration screen. |
| COR-71195 | Flow Designer - Create Alert Using a Form: Only the relevant form sections now appear in the layout after connecting to an HTTP trigger. |
| COR-73602 COR-73559 COR-73576 COR-73662 (SUP-25352) |
Roles - Read-Only Users: Ensured appropriate access for Read-Only Users to various screens in the web user interface. |
May 15-19, 2023
Copy a group
Want to save time and reduce errors when setting or replicating a complex scheduling pattern for a new group? Perhaps you want to use an existing group as a template for new groups you create? The 'Copy Group' functionality from our Robotron Release is now available for On-Call and Broadcast groups:
A couple of important things to note:
- Copying a group is available for Broadcast groups with up to 1000 members and for On-Call groups with up to 200 members.
- Copied groups are not added as recipients to the same forms and lists as the original group. You must add the group as a recipient to any messages or forms that you want to target it.
Notifications report: Source and Device Type charts
Availability: Early Access Program
We've added two new charts to the Notifications report for Notifications by Source and Notifications by Device:
You can use these charts to better understand the notification and volume trends by device type and source and to spot where failures are occurring, which devices users do and don't respond to, and other opportunities for operational improvements.
See the SMS messages included in your alerts
Availability: Early Access Program
The Message tab of the Alerts report now includes the Text (SMS) template used for your alert. This is useful for troubleshooting issues with your messaging and for keeping a more complete record of the communications sent out for your alerts.
Who's getting alerted 'After Hours'?
Availability: Early Access Program
Help prevent burnout by tracking who's getting slammed by alerts 'After Hours'. We've added a new After-Hours Alerts metric to the User Performance report to shows you the number of times users are alerted between 7pm to 7am and anytime on Saturday and Sunday:
Support notes (week of May 15-19)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-67202 | Alerts report - User Delivery tab: Updated the icons for Android and iOS devices in the Notified Recipients drop-down menu. |
| COR-73664 (SUP-25501) |
Alerts report: Ensured the Alerts report table properly displays all columns. |
| COR-73781 (SUP-25516) |
Alerts report - Filters: Corrected an issue that prevented users from selecting multiple recipients in the Targeted Recipients filter menu. |
| COR-73783 (SUP-25513) |
Dashboard - Alerts View widget: Fixed an issue so that the Alerts View dashboard widget displays proper results when filters are applied. |
| COR-73600 (SUP-25489) |
Dashboard - Alert View: Fixed an issue that prevented the dashboard from showing valid results when custom date ranges are applied. |
| COR-73657 | Incidents - Incident Console: Ensured inactive users were properly displayed in the Add Resolvers window. |
| COR-70081 | Incidents - Automations: Fixed an issue that caused enabled Flow Trigger forms to display as disabled in the Incident Console, preventing users from triggering automations. |
| COR-73432 (SUP-25388) |
Incidents - Incident Timeline: Corrected an issue to ensure the Incident Timeline accurately logs user data. |
| COR-71338 | Incidents List: Fixed an issue where attempting to view incidents initiated by deleted users would return an error. |
| COR-73570 (SUP-25488) |
Flow Designer - Create Alert step - Handling & Overrides: Corrected an issue that prevented expiration values from being properly saved. |
| COR-73483 (SUP-25484) |
Flow Designer - Combo box: Fixed an issue that prevented users from searching combo box values. |
| COR-73076 (SUP-25384) |
Workflows - Trigger Alerts by Webhook: Corrected an issue that prevented the Settings tab of the properly installed workflow from showing authentication and initiation data. |
May 8-12, 2023
Get resolver delivery failure warnings in the Incident Console
When an incident commander notifies a resolver to engage in an incident, it's really important to know if the notification wasn't delivered—and why. Delivery failures can be caused by missing or misconfigured devices, empty or inactive groups or shifts, or services without an owner.
Now, when a resolver experiences a delivery failure and there's no one else in the escalation path to receive the message, the console displays a 'Failed' badge to indicate that the commander should find another way to notify the resolver, or engage a different resolver instead.
The incident timeline includes an entry for the delivery failure, with a direct link to the alert log where you can find out the exact reason and details for the failure:
Conference support for creating alerts
The 'Conference Bridge' tab we added to the Create Alert and Create Alert Using a Form step as part of the Robotron release are now available in production! This enhancement enables you to automatically create and configure xMatters Hosted and External conference bridges as part of your flows. Or, if you'd like, you can define the bridge dynamically as part of your flow using an output or a constant value.
Support notes (week of May 8-12)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-70362 | Group Performance Report: Ensured the URL for the Group Performance Report is accurate when the page loads. |
| COR-73025 | Alerts Report (performance improvement): Improved the performance of the Alerts report so it loads results more promptly. |
| COR-46246 | Users - Devices: Corrected an issue that prevented users from seeing complete lists of device names in the drop-down menu. |
May 1-5, 2023
Zoom Server-to-Server endpoint & updated Create Meeting step
We've updated our Zoom Create Meeting step to use a new Zoom Server-to-Server endpoint type in Flow Designer. This endpoint replaces the JWT authentication method previously used by Zoom, which will be deprecated on June 1, 2023. If you're using the Create Meeting step, you'll need to create a Zoom Server-to-Server OAuth app and update your step to the latest version to use a new Zoom Server-to-Server endpoint created using your app's credentials.
Support notes (week of May 1-5)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-65864 | Users - Schedule tab: Fixed an issue that prevented the Schedule tab from retaining on-call information if users navigated away from then returned to the page. |
| COR-71168 (SUP-25302) |
Groups - adding members: Fixed an issue where it was possible to add members to a recently deleted group, resulting a race condition. |
| COR-71322 | Incidents - automations: Fixed an issue that caused automations run on an xMatters Agent to appear as "Failed" in the incident timeline when they'd actually run successfully. |
| COR-70526 (SUP-25209) |
xMatters REST API - POST /shifts: Corrected an issue that prevented proper shift rotations when new members were added to a shift. |
April 24-28, 2023
Redesigned Dynamic Teams
In our Robotron Release Overview, we introduced you to all the new features we've been working on for Dynamic teams and this week they're available in all instances!
You can now take advantage of the new 'Add Dynamic Team' model and redesigned interface (which shares the share the same look and feel as on-call and broadcast groups). The 'Overview' and 'People' tabs allow you to quickly see your team's critical information at a glance, manage the admins and observer roles for the team, and define the search criteria.
Notifications report updates
We're excited to bring you some extra additions to our recently redesigned Notifications report that will make reviewing your system notifications more efficient.
We've added a new 'Source' and 'Form' filter so you can quickly find and view notifications based on the signal or form that generated them.
The Notification Delivery chart allows you to easily visualize data about the number of notifications in each delivery state. However, if you don't need to see this graph, we've now included a 'Show Notifications charts' checkbox that allows you to temporarily hide this information so you can make better use of your screen real estate.
Finally, we've added a new 'Created' column to the report so you can easily see the date and time each notification was created in xMatters.
Incident MTTA & MTTR Group Performance widget options
The Group Performance widget helps group admins quickly view important information about how their groups are responding to alerts and incidents. Now, with our new graph type you can quickly review incident Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) and Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) data straight from your dashboard.
Exporting alerts properties
If you export the Alerts report to perform additional analysis or share with teams outside of xMatters, you'll now notice that the exported report now includes all of the properties of the alert in the alert details tab.
Support notes (week of April 24-28)
| xMatters Internal Reference No. | Summary |
| COR-71161 (SUP-25305) |
Alerts report: Fixed an issue that prevented the Alerts report from promptly loading data for some users. |
| COR-71205 | Flow Designer - step permissions: Corrected an issue that prevented users from seeing custom steps and HTTP triggers when the steps were shared with them. |
| COR-70827 (SUP-25263) |
Flow Designer - Create Alert step: Fixed an issue in the Create Alert step that prevented Android users from seeing the "Respond with comment" option in their notification responses. |
| COR-71313 (SUP-25329) |
Alerts report: Corrected an issue that prevented users with valid permissions from seeing their alerts in the Alerts report. |
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 xMatters Deployment Process & Early Access article.
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Highlights and support notes added for week of April 24-28, 2023.
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Highlights and support notes added for week of May 1-5, 2023.
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Highlights and support notes added for week of May 8-12, 2023.
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Highlights and support notes added for week of May 29-June 2, 2023.
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Highlights and support notes added for week of June 5-9, 2023.
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Highlights and support notes added for week of June 12-16, 2023.
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Highlights and support notes added for week of June 19-23, 2023.
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Highlights and support notes added for week of June 26-30, 2023.
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We've started working on our next quarterly release, Tetris.
Follow the Tetris Development Highlights & Support Notes page to receive updates throughout the quarter on all the fun and functionality we're working on!
The Space Invaders release is live in production environments.