The Yars’ Revenge release is breaking through space shields, swerving past swirls, and calling on cannons on its way to touch down in xMatters instances! Here are some of the latest features we're offering for your incident-fighting arsenal:

• With configurable status pages, easily track your organization's services from a centralized location and communicate system and incident status without interrupting resolvers or service teams.
• Prevent unwanted calls and spammers from bombarding your Live Call Routing lines by restricting access to devices already configured within xMatters.
• Keep resolvers and stakeholders in the loop by automatically sending incident updates to the chat tools they rely on. 
• Quickly access and organize your incident notifications, view details, add comments, and track past responses with a redesigned Inbox.
• Use our enhanced user schedule list view and new on-call widget to easily track your shifts and see when you’re next scheduled in xMatters.

Read on to see what else we're including to ensure you always have the best strategy to battle any incident your systems may encounter.

Availability

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

• Non-production environment access: Tuesday, December 10
• Production environment access: Tuesday, January 14 (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:

• Customizable incident stakeholder update messages
• Configurable call-in scripts for Live Call Routing

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 introducing internal status pages—a way for stakeholders of all description to see overall service health and incident status at a glance—and offering up a trio of enticing enhancements to our Incident Console.

Internal status pages

Availability: Non-production access in January 2025; production access in Yars' Revenge (Advanced customers)

For incident commanders and resolvers, communicating the status of an incident or service to stakeholders is a critical part of incident resolution. But time spent communicating can sometimes take away from time spent identifying, mitigating, and resolving incidents. 

That's why internal status pages are not just an important tool in any team's incident response arsenal, but a potential game-changer for organizations. 

An internal status page streamlines communication, reduces support queries, and provides a single source of truth for system status, updates, and issues. When incident updates and service statuses can be found in a centralized location, resolvers can focus on mitigation and resolution actions instead of responding to ad hoc requests. This kind of transparency into an organization's services also helps improve overall operational efficiency by allowing users to make better decisions in a higher trust environment.

To create a status page, you can select the services you want to display, and group them together by region, service tier, impact level, or any other category that best suits your stakeholders' expectations. Any active incidents involving those services are listed at the top of the status page so visitors can immediately see anything that might be affecting the health of the system. 

With the internal status pages in Yars' Revenge, you can create a status page for technical leadership to see up-to-the-minute high-level incident and service status at any time. You could also create a separate status page for less technical colleagues or business team members to give them easy insight into applications that they care about.

Incident Console updates and enhancements

Our journey to make xMatters the easiest, most intuitive place to resolve incidents means we never stop looking for ways to make existing features even better. In Yars' Revenge, we're looking at three different ways to enhance your experience while using the Incident Console.

Edit incident timeline notes

Availability: Late January

Incident commanders and scribes can now edit notes on the incident timeline during an incident to ensure everyone has the correct information as they ramp up on an incident or look to assist in mitigation efforts. 

Your resolvers will appreciate having the right context in the moment, and anyone responsible for compiling a post-incident report will appreciate that notes can be edited to address incorrect information or distracting typos. And, of course, the timeline keeps a record of when and by whom the note was edited.

Easily reassign Incident Commanders 

We’ve made it easier to change the incident commander by allowing users to claim the role or use context menu actions to reassign instead of just drag-and-drop actions.

Now you can take ownership of an incident without adding yourself as a resolver first, or instantly access a context menu to reassign the role without dragging and dropping.

Clickable links in change record details

Change records often include links to the service or resource that was changed and those URLs are now clickable when change details are displayed on the Incident Console.

Resolvers can drill into changes by clicking the links, making it easier than ever to get more context on the changes that may have led to an incident, and reducing the time it takes to find more context on those changes during an incident.

Automatically send incident updates to chat channels

Keeping resolvers in the loop about incident updates is crucial when collaborating on an incident, and with Yars' Revenge we're making it easier to get those updates out to your team quickly by targeting the one place they're sure to see them: in their chat channels, of course!

Now you can simply indicate which updates you want xMatters to send to the channel when you're creating the channel for an incident.

You can limit these updates to critical items such as changes to status and priority, or choose to send every detail possible, including whenever someone adds a note to the timeline or messages stakeholders.

Sneak peek: Customizable stakeholder update messages

Keeping your stakeholders informed is a critical component of Incident Management. Using Flow Designer, you'll be able to fully customize messages sent when updating stakeholders. This means you can use your own branding, message format, and content that your stakeholders expect.

On-call management

Nobody does on-call management like xMatters. Our focus on usability and design underpins everything in the way we build the most advanced on-call scheduling system on the market, and it's a major theme for many features in our quarterly releases. 

This release is no exception as we introduce a refresh of the user schedule page so resolvers have a clear view of their current and upcoming on-call responsibilities, and continue to enhance the Live Call Routing feature with additional configuration options designed to streamline and further secure the call-in experience.

Refreshed user schedule page

To help provide a clear and accurate view of your on-call schedule—an essential for effective time management—we're working on a series of new features and enhancements for the xMatters user schedule. We'll be incorporating these changes into the next few releases, starting with the enhanced Schedule List view.

The updated look and feel of the list includes color-coded shifts, making it easier to see recurring shifts and relate them to other areas of the interface (such as group calendars). 

Look for more powerful enhancements coming up in future releases, such as day, week, and month views, primary and secondary on-call shift filters, and much more.

User schedule On-Call widget

Another enhancement to the user schedule, the new On-Call widget gives you an instant look at your on-call status. If you're on call, the widget displays how long you'll be on call for and, if you're lucky enough to not be on call, the widget shows how much time you have before your next shift.

The widget provides a view into primary, secondary, and other shifts separately, and includes the duration of your on-call status for each of those shift levels so you have a clear idea of when you need to be at the ready.

Advanced Live Call Routing configurations

Our Live Call Routing features gives users the ability to connect to the appropriate on-call team by calling in and choosing the group they want to talk to; no unwieldy call trees, no conference bridges, no message forms, and no logging in—just immediate connection to the assistance they need.

With Yars' Revenge, you can restrict access so that only callers with voice devices configured in xMatters will be able to call in. This is particularly helpful if, for example, you have an internal-only support number. By limiting access to users with matching voice devices already set up in xMatters, anyone not in the organization can't call in, preventing unwanted calls and spammers from tying up your lines. 

To help callers better understand their options without having to rename or create new groups, you can now customize the message (by voice recording or text-to-speech) for each assigned digit in your Live Call Routing configuration.

Additionally, to further help speed up connections, we've streamlined the message that users hear for configurations that only include a single digit.

Sneak peek: Customizable call-in scripts

In a future release, we'll be empowering you to craft the messages that you want callers to hear when they dial-in to your Live Call Routing configurations. Provide them with context about what they have reached, add specific detail about the meaning of each digit and customize what is said if no on-call team member could be found.

Automation & integrations

In this release, we're introducing a new way to quickly see an overview of the scheduled triggers in your system, along with a host of improvements and enhancements for Flow Designer to make integrating your tools and automating your processes even easier.

Triggers view

As your toolchain grows, so too will your integrations and signals into xMatters. While the Signals report and Workflows page can give a helpful guide into the tools you've connected, you may occasionally need to track down or check in on a specific trigger. This can prove a little tricky when you have a large number of active workflows, or when you didn't create the trigger yourself.

Which is why we're pleased to introduce the new Triggers page, designed to provide a comprehensive overview of the triggers in your system.

This page provides essential details about your triggers, including the workflow where each trigger resides, its current status, the last execution time and status, the next scheduled execution, and even a direct link to the trigger on its canvas in Flow Designer. You can quickly narrow down the list to triggers within a specific workflow, just the ones you can edit, or filter triggers based on whether they're active.

For Yars' Revenge, the Triggers page will show an overview of all the scheduled and HTTP triggers in your system, but stay tuned for future updates as we expand this view to support and manage additional trigger types!

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.

Schedule trigger enhancements

Our recently introduced scheduled triggers make it easy to run flows at regular intervals, but it's not always immediately evident when a trigger is next scheduled to be, well... triggered.

With Yars' Revenge, you can simply hover over a scheduled trigger on the canvas to see a popup with the next scheduled execution time. Plus, if you open the trigger's context menu you'll find a new option to manually initiate the flow. Testing and managing your scheduled workflows just got easier!

AWS SNS Messages trigger

If you're using AWS services beyond CloudWatch or have custom services to send notifications via SNS, you can now trigger workflows in xMatters with those notifications! With the new AWS SNS Messages trigger, you can seamlessly initiate a workflow for any SNS message, expanding your integration possibilities and streamlining your processes.

Google Chat steps

With our new Post Text Message, Create Space, and Invite to Space steps, you can seamlessly integrate Google Chat into your automated workflows for faster, more efficient incident management.

If you're relying on Google Chat for communication, you can automatically create a chat space for incidents and post timely updates to ensure your resolution teams and stakeholders stay informed and can act quickly to resolve issues. 

Updated flood control response message

When testing your workflows or reviewing tool logs, you may have noticed a "429: Too Many Requests" response from xMatters and wondered whether it was due to submitting too many API calls too quickly, or if the request was suppressed due to an alert flood. To help alleviate any of this uncertainty, 429 response messages that occur as a result of flood control settings now specifically indicate that flood control triggered the response. The messages also identify the associated workflow and trigger, and apply to both HTTP and email triggers.

Messaging

With our messaging capabilities, users can 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 xMatters web user interface to organize and respond to their notifications.

Inbox refresh

Availability: Week of January 20

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.

Reporting & analytics

The xMatters reporting capabilities provide insight and visibility across your entire service architecture so you can identify possible areas for continuous improvement and ways to make your incident response more effective and efficient. In this release, we're providing even more information about changes in your xMatters environment by updating the Recent Alerts widget in the Communication Center dashboards and enhancing the System Audit report.

Updated Recent Alerts widget

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. The updates in this release make it easy for teams to get multiple views of active and recent alerts.

• 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, so you only navigate to the Alerts report when necessary.

All of the things you love about the current widget will still be there, but this fresh take will make the widget more useful and a bit easier to interact with.

System Audit report enhancements

We're continuing to build out and enhance the new System Audit report by adding more components and more information. In this release, we're adding new filters for device type and group so you can easily narrow your results to just what you want to see. We've also enhanced the report to retrieve data asynchronously, meaning that no matter how big your dataset is, the audit report will always retrieve complete and accurate data.

We've also added group member changes! The System Audit report now includes who was added and removed from each of your groups and when—including supervisors. So if members of a group aren't in the state you expect, you can easily search the report and see exactly what changed. 

Mobile updates

The xMatters mobile apps empower users to respond to notifications, resolve incidents, and send messages to their teams. We're continuously developing and iterating our apps to give people the tools they need, when they need them, wherever they happen to be. In Yars' Revenge, we're offering more control for incident commanders on the go by providing instant access to tasks and task lists.

Adding tasks and task lists

Tasks are a straightforward way to guide your incident responders to do the right thing, at the right time, even in the thick of a major incident. Now incident commanders can add and edit tasks for incidents in the xMatters mobile app. You can also add pre-defined task lists to your incidents to quickly add a play-by-play to any incident on the go.

Early Access Program & feature delivery update

The goal of our current delivery model 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 four weeks prior to an 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 xMatters Deployment 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, 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 Yars' Revenge release, and we're looking forward to seeing you again soon for Zaxxon...

 

 

 

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.