Blast off into a new era of incident resolution! Your teams may not have to choose between ground tanks or flying planes like they do in the classic Xenon arcade game, but with our Xenon release, resolvers will be able to quickly switch between strategies to ensure they’re always working as effectively as possible. 

• Send a system notification to a user or group when an alert isn’t responded to by the end of the escalation timeline.
• Share a link to your on-call schedule to coordinate with your team in other calendar apps.
• Automatically trigger flows at specified intervals with a new ‘Schedule’ trigger in Flow Designer.
• Ensure that incident resolvers know when they’re assigned tasks and when their assigned tasks are updated with the new ‘Notify Assignee’ option.
• Keep team members better connected by adding chat apps, conference calls, video meetings, and other collaboration channels to your playbooks.

Read on to see what else we've packed in this mission’s inventory!

Availability

Before you scroll down to see all the improvements included in this release, here are some important dates:

• Non-production environment access: Tuesday, September 24
• Production environment access: Tuesday, October 22 (enabled between 10:00-10:30am Pacific)

Though we aim to include as many features in each release as we can, it's possible that not everything in the release will be available at the same time. If that's the case for a specific feature, we'll include a note about availability in its write-up below.

Sneak peeks

As a special bonus, we'll also give you some sneak peeks at enhancements we're working on for a future release:

• Automatically post incident updates to chat channels
• New Inbox experience
• Updated Recent Alerts widget for enhanced usability

Incident response & service intelligence

By embedding services directly into its incident management capabilities, the xMatters service reliability platform ensures greater situational awareness and enables faster response to digital service interruptions. 

In this release, we're once again expanding the capabilities of our incident management playbooks — this time to include collaboration channels, adding a Tasks page so you can more easily manage cross-incident tasks, and providing a way to automatically notify resolvers whenever they are assigned a new task or an existing task is updated. 

Playbook collaboration channels

Communication across resolver teams is key to resolving an incident quickly. And, a big part of getting resolvers to communicate is making sure they not only have the spaces they need to collaborate, but also ensuring they can identify and access them immediately. xMatters has always supported the ability to manage your collaboration channels through the Incident Console and Flow Designer, and now we're making it easier by adding collaboration channels to playbooks.

With the Xenon release, you can add new or existing Slack channels, Microsoft Teams meetings and channels, or just about any other collaboration space you prefer using the same powerful cross-workflow conditions that playbooks provide for task lists and attachments. By adding collaboration channels to a playbook, you're ensuring that incident commanders and resolvers automatically have a place to meet right away without needing to maintain the logic separately in Flow Designer.

For example, you could enhance your Critical Severity Incidents playbook by having it create a new Microsoft Teams meeting where stakeholders can quickly contact the incident team in a centralized way. Or, if you have a subset of services owned by a single team, you could automatically link that team's Slack channel to any incident involving those services. You could even add a playbook for all digital operations incidents that automatically creates an incident-specific channel for instant collaboration and faster resolution.

Cross-incident task management

As any incident commander tasked with working multiple incidents can confirm, it can sometimes be difficult to understand which tasks are most critical, or even whether you have tasks outstanding from previous incidents. 

To help incident commanders and resolvers better manage their cross-incident tasks, we're adding a new Tasks page in the Xenon release. You can use the Tasks page to quickly identify any critical tasks that have not been started, find outstanding tasks assigned to a specific resolver, or check whether there are tasks that remain open after an incident has been resolved.

You might also use the Tasks page to easily find a task that has a useful description from a specific date or incident, or perform a bulk operation to quickly clean up old tasks. 

Task assignment notifications

Tasks help teams keep on top of what needs to be done during an incident—but how does a team member know when they've been assigned a task? And what if you need to assign a task to someone who isn't engaged in the incident but don't want to add them as a resolver?

To help bring users up to speed and let them know what they need to do, you can enable automatic task notifications. Now, when you add a task in xMatters (or reassign it to another resolver) you have the option to 'Notify Assignee'. When enabled, the assignee will automatically be notified when they've been assigned a new task and any time it's updated.

Groups & on-call management

In this release, we're enhancing the on-call scheduling experience in xMatters for group supervisors and users by providing a way for supervisors to know whenever an alert reaches the end of a group's escalation sequence without anyone taking ownership, and giving users a shareable link to their xMatters schedule.

Notify at end of escalation

In our last release, we added tools that give you the ability to cycle group members on and off duty and to see whether your configured escalations and rotations will behave the way you expect them to. This release adds to your group escalation toolkit by providing a way to ensure your groups are responding to notifications correctly. 

By enabling this option for a shift in an on-call group, you can send a system notification to a specific user or group—such as a group supervisor or the team responsible for maintaining groups in xMatters—if none of the shift members responded to the alert before the escalation sequence finished.

The system message lets the recipient know that the alert was still escalating or otherwise unacknowledged when it reached the end the shift's escalation sequence, including retries. The message includes information about the alert and a link to the Alerts report, giving you immediate insight into what happened and why.

This can be a handy way to identify groups with faulty or incomplete escalation sequences, workflows with response options that don't let a responder to take ownership of an alert or otherwise stop the alert from escalating, and gaps in service ownership.

Shared calendars

You can now create a sharable link to your on-call schedule that you can use in your calendar clients or any service that supports universal calendar files (ICS). This calendar will auto-update daily giving you an up-to-date view of your upcoming shifts. You can choose to share your schedule using the same "Primary", "Primary and Secondary", and "All Shifts" views available when viewing the schedule in your Profile.

When you share a live calendar link, you're creating a copy of your schedule that automatically updates every day. By pointing a calendar app at the link instead of importing a file, the app will receive a new copy of the file whenever it refreshes, and any changes to your schedule will be reflected in the calendar app.

Automation & integrations

In this release, we're introducing a host of new and updated features across our automation and integration platform. These upgrades include a new, easy way to trigger flows at regular intervals and a boon for troubleshooters in the form of more granular information for each step in a flow. We're also offering up a new version of our Microsoft SCOM integration specifically tailored for Flow Designer, and more enhancements for existing steps and integrations.

Flow Designer

Flow Designer is our all-inclusive, drag-and-drop visual workflow builder that lets users integrate their tools and build incident resolution workflows easily, no matter their technical experience level. In this release, we continue to add features and enhancements that empower you to get the most out of your toolchain.

Scheduled triggers

Availability: Non-production instances: early October; production instances: Xenon Quarterly Release

Flow Designer has multiple built-in and customizable triggers that will initiate flows based on incoming signals—but what if you need a flow to run on a set schedule? For example, you might want to periodically check the status of a specific service and take action if its resource pool is being consumed at a higher-than-normal rate. Or, you might want to build an integration with a tool that has an API, but is not capable of sending signals to Flow Designer.

With the Xenon release, Base and Advanced customers can benefit from the new Scheduled trigger in Flow Designer. 

You can use a Schedule trigger to automatically trigger a flow to run at regular intervals, such as "every 2 hours" or "once every seven days". This lets Flow Designer regularly query another system for any required information and process it without the need for extra add-ons or additional complexity within your flows.

Expanded step execution details

If you've built a flow in Flow Designer, you've likely had to troubleshoot it at some point, or perhaps you've wanted to optimize part of a flow to reduce complexity. With the Xenon release, you can easily view more granular execution details for each step in the Activity panel.

The Activity panel now includes even more information about your flows, such as how long each step took to complete, whether a flow ran on an agent, and which specific agent it used. In addition, if an error occurs, you can quickly identify the issue without having to scroll through detailed logs.

Define incident type for a workflow

Our latest enhancement to installable workflows lets you choose a default incident type during the initial installation process.

Any flows with built-in Initiate Incident steps are automatically set to the selected incident type, which means you no longer have to set the type when configuring these steps.

Updated AWS CloudWatch Alarms trigger

Based on customer feedback, we've modified the AWS CloudWatch Alarms trigger in Flow Designer to use AlarmName instead of MessageId as the value for the Signal ID output. This should ensure that the Signal ID remains consistent across all alarm updates and allow your flows to react to changes to a specific alarm.

xMatters Agent update OS support

Are you running the latest OS versions in your environment and need to deploy the xMatters Agent? The xMatters Agent now supports the three most recent releases of Windows Server, Red Hat, Debian, and Ubuntu. Updated installation instructions can be found on the in-product Agents page and in the help documentation.

While these are the officially tested OS versions, you should still be able to install agents on other systems as long as they meet the installation requirements. And, if you didn't already know, there is also an official xMatters Agent Docker image!

Supported operating systems:

• Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022
• Red Hat 7, 8, 9
• Debian 10, 11, 12
• Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, 24.04

Sneak peek: Automate updates between incidents and ChatOps

Availability: November 2024

Have you built or are you planning to build workflows to send xMatters incident updates to a collaboration channel? You might be asking yourself, "I already have a chat channel for my incident, so why do I need to use Flow Designer to create custom workflows just to send updates?" Well, now you don’t have to!

With the Xenon release, you can automatically send incident updates to a Teams channel associated with the incident. You can even choose the specific types of updates you want, such as status or priority changes.

BTW, keep a close eye on this space: the ability to send the same kind of incident updates to a Slack channel is coming soon!

New & updated workflows

New Microsoft SCOM integration for Flow Designer

Availability: Xenon Quarterly Release

If you're using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), you can now migrate from the legacy integration (which relies on the Integration Builder and Integration Agent technology) to a more modern, Flow Designer-based workflow that uses the xMatters Agent and introduces new steps in Flow Designer:

• Microsoft SCOM trigger: Trigger a flow whenever Flow Designer receives a signal about new SCOM alerts and updates
• Set Alert Resolution State step: Update the SCOM alert resolution state and include a comment

We've also provided a new workflow to help you seamlessly install and set up your Microsoft SCOM integration within Flow Designer.

ServiceNow 5.x integration certification for Xanadu release

Availability: Now in xMatters

The xMatters 5.x ServiceNow integration app is now certified for compatibility with the Xanadu release! Because this did not require any changes in functionality, users can transition to this updated version seamlessly, and workflows compatible with integration versions 5.7.0 and 5.8.0 will continue to work without any modifications.

Enhanced Moogsoft integration

Availability: Xenon Quarterly Release

We've updated our Moogsoft integration to enhance security, simplify workflows, and resolve some potential out-of-the-box configuration issues. The Moogsoft steps now use the new Flow Designer Token endpoint, which securely stores the API key within the endpoint configuration instead of passing it as a step input. Other updates to the workflow template correct certain default configurations and streamline the workflow using recent Flow Designer enhancements, including the new Condition step.

Messaging

The xMatters messaging capabilities enable users to quickly populate predefined forms or scenarios and send notifications to recipients on any device they choose. In this release, we're improving the experience for users that rely on the messaging capabilities to organize and respond to notifications in the xMatters web user interface.

Sneak peek: New Inbox experience

Availability: Non-production access in October; production access in Yar's Revenge

React and respond to notifications faster with the refreshed design of the Inbox, featuring an improved layout with easy access to important alerts and the ability to view expanded details in a concise, organized format.

With this new design, you can respond and add comments quickly and effortlessly, easily track which alerts you responded to or commented on, and use the new sorting option to focus on active or high-priority alerts at a glance.

Sneak peek: Redesigning the Recent Alerts widget

The xMatters Communication Center is an important tool to make it easy for teams to get multiple views of active and recent alerts. We’re looking to modernize the widgets available on your dashboards by improving the performance and experience for our users, starting with one of the most useful and versatile widgets, Recent Alerts. Look for the following updates in the upcoming Yar's Revenge release:

• Streamlined rows ensure each alert fits, no matter how many columns are added to the dashboard.
• An improved message preview and detail view will pop open in the side panel, rather than a modal dialog.
• Changing the default interaction to the message preview and details will help you stay on the dashboard, only navigating to the Alerts report when necessary.

All of the things you love about the current widget will still be there, but we're giving it a fresh take to make interacting with the widget a bit easier. Oh, and since this is such a widely used feature, we’ll be giving you lots of time to test it! Expect to see it in your non-production instances shortly after the Xenon release goes live.

Reporting & analytics

The reporting capabilities of xMatters give you insight and visibility across your entire service architecture to help identify possible areas for continuous improvement and ways to make your incident response more effective and efficient. In this release, we're enhancing the System Audit report to provide even more information about changes in your xMatters environment.

Group audit reporting

We're continuing to build out and enhance the new System Audit report by adding more components and more information. With the Xenon release, you can now find changes to your group information in the report, and use it to audit group creation & deletion, status, failsafe devices, duplicates, and holiday sites. You can also easily track changes to group supervisors and observers.

Mobile updates

Our users depend on the xMatters mobile apps to respond to notifications, resolve incidents, and send messages to their teams. We're continuously working to ensure that people have the tools they need at their fingertips, no matter where they happen to be. In Xenon, we're refreshing the look and feel of the Inbox and updating the incident management screens to offer more control for incident commanders on the go.

Mobile inbox

With a new look and feel to the Inbox, you get a less cluttered view into the status of your active and inactive alerts. The new Inbox also features a default "Active First" view that shows your active alerts up top, followed by all inactive alerts. This way you don't miss alerts that have become inactive before you can see them in your Inbox.

Incident management on mobile

We've given the incident management screens in the xMatters apps a visual refresh to empower and assist the incident commander on the go. You now have the ability to add and edit tasks and task lists, and use the new filters in the timeline to filter tasks, linked incidents, attachments, automations, and playbooks.

Learn more

These are the main features for this release but, as always, there are several other small changes and enhancements we're delivering to keep xMatters forging forward. Detailed information and instructions for using these new features will be available in our online documentation.

We hope you enjoy everything we've packed into the Xenon release, and we're looking forward to seeing you again soon for Yar's Revenge...

 

 

 

The information in this article is the intellectual property of xMatters, an Everbridge Company, 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.