After 26 levels releases, our final retro video game inspired release, Zaxxon, is entering the incident management stratosphere! Let’s review our inventory and see what we've packed for this mission:

• Automatically summarize activities or translate information by integrating AI into your flows with the OpenAI: Chat Completions step.
• Subscribe to status pages and receive notifications to your configured devices when incidents on specific status pages are changed.
• More detailed day, week, month, and list views for the user schedule so your team can quickly and easily check their schedules in whichever way works best for them.
• Fully customize stakeholder updates with specific branding or message formats through Flow Designer.

And so much more! Read on to learn about all the goodies...

Availability

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

• Non-production environment access: Tuesday, March 25
• Production environment access: Tuesday, April 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 peek

As a special bonus, we'll also give you a sneak peek at an enhancement we're working on for a future release:

• "No available agent" configurations for Live Call Routing: specify what to do when no one can answer an incoming call.

Incident response & service intelligence

The xMatters service reliability platform delivers greater situational awareness and enables faster response to digital service interruptions by embedding services and service intelligence directly into its adaptive incident resolution capabilities. 

In this release, we're introducing a way to customize the messages sent to incident stakeholders, offering users the option of subscribing to internal status page updates, and giving incident commanders the ability to manage impacted applications within an incident's service dependencies map.

Customizable stakeholder updates

To give resolvers time to focus on mitigating an incident, it’s critical to keep your stakeholders informed so they don’t feel the need to interrupt the team. With customizable incident stakeholder updates using Flow Designer, you can tailor your communications to your organization’s needs. For example, you could use the new Stakeholder Update trigger to:

• Modify message formats to use your company branding or to present the message format and context in a way that's already familiar to your stakeholders.
• Automatically prompt the incident commander for more specific content and context using a Flow Trigger Form.

You can extend this functionality even further by sending alerts with different content to different groups of stakeholders, overriding an existing stakeholder list and sending the information to a customized list of recipients, or using a different custom format for messages depending on the device type such as SMS or voice.

Subscribe to status page changes

Our status pages provide a self-service, single-source-of-truth for your extended team to understand what is happening with your applications and services at any given moment. But what if there was a way for users to proactively understand when incidents occur, minimizing the need to log in and view the status pages and further reducing frustration, while helping you build trust with your audience?

With the Zaxxon release, xMatters users will be able to subscribe to any status page they have access to. Whenever the manager of the status page links to or updates an incident, they can choose to send a notification to the page's subscribers. This keeps subscribed users informed even if they aren't logged in or otherwise not able to access the status page themselves. 

Add impacted services from dependency view

One of the more challenging areas when training new incident commanders—or resolvers, for that matter—is an understanding of the web of dependencies between your applications and services. In xMatters, an incident's service dependency map is an invaluable way to immediately see and and understand what services may be impacted and who to contact when resolving an incident.

To help incident commanders explore connected applications and notify owners even faster, the Zaxxon release adds the ability to quickly add impacted services to an incident via the service dependencies map.

This option gives incident commanders the ability to use the service dependencies map to keep the list of impacted services up to date and identify the next areas to explore or work on without leaving the map view.

On-call management

Just because we have the most advanced on-call scheduling system in the business doesn't mean we stop looking for ways to make it even better. We continue to focus on usability and design in the way we build our product and we're always looking for ways to enhance the on-call management experience. 

This release introduces new ways to view your user schedule and the ability to customize your Live Call Routing scripts. We've also got a sneak peek of another Live Call Routing feature coming your way: the ability to configure different behaviors and options for users who call in when there are no agents available. 

New user schedule views

We're continuing to enhance the user experience for viewing schedules by building out the new look and feel we introduced in our last release. For Zaxxon, we're adding more flexible ways to view your schedule so you can choose the best way to view the information you want to see.

• The Day view provides a more granular view of your hour-by-hour schedule.
• The Week view provides a handy combination of detailed shift information and your upcoming obligations.
• The Month view provides a higher-level overview of all of your upcoming shifts at a glance.

We've also made viewing and managing absences easier by displaying the absences on your schedule in List view and whether you have a scheduled replacement.

Customize live call routing call-in scripts

Craft the messages that you want callers to hear when they call in to your Live Call Routing lines. Provide them with context about what they have reached (what the line is used for), add specific detail about the groups they have to choose from, and guide them towards next steps if no one was able to answer the call.

Each stanza or phrase in the script can be customized using recordings or specific text-to-speech phrases, or you can leave the default setting — customize as much or as little as you need.

Sneak peek: "No agent available" configurations for Live Call Routing

Our Live Call Routing feature has already helped plenty of users reach just the right person they need to talk to and they've offered some great suggestions on how to make it even better. To help fill in any potential gaps in communication between call-in users and the agents they're trying to reach, we're implementing some options for how to handle missed calls in an upcoming release.

For example, if you're a user calling in to request support from a specific group and nobody's available to take your call or can't answer quickly enough, you'll be able to leave a message with context about your issue or request. If you're an agent looking for information about any live calls that you missed, you'll receive an alert with the messages and can either call the user back to help them with their issue or escalate the request to the appropriate resource.

Automation & integrations

In this release, we're delivering a number of improvements and enhancements for Flow Designer— including new ways to integrate with AI tools—to make automating your processes even easier, and introducing a Terraform Provider that enables you to centrally manage your xMatters instance configuration.

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 so you can get the most out of your toolchain.

New steps for integrating with AI/LLM tools

To enhance your workflows with LLM tools, we're introducing new steps for integrating with AI. Starting with OpenAI and Azure OpenAI, you can now use chat completions similar to ChatGPT or Copilot:

• OpenAI Chat Completions
• Azure OpenAI Chat Completions

These steps enable Flow Designer to pass a prompt to your chosen tool and model, and receive a response that can be used throughout your workflow. You can:

• Summarize alert or incident information
• Translate text
• Generate drafts of notifications
• Determine sentiment of an incident comment

The possibilities are endless! Because you're using your own accounts for the tools, you can select the models to use, ensuring better control over both your data and the LLM/AI tools in your environment.

Add & Update Status Page Incidents steps

Availability: Early May

Your needs and processes dictate how you keep your stakeholders informed, and your status pages should adapt to your specific requirements. So, we've built Flow Designer steps to let you take control of when an incident should be shared with a status page and how you choose to update it based on your incident response process.

The Add Incident to Status Page step automatically links an incident to a status page when it's initiated so you and your team can stay focused on triage and mitigation. The Update Status Page Incident step automatically keeps your audience up to date on status and severity changes as the incident commander interacts with the Incident Console.

 

Google Chat

Availability: Now available in xMatters

The Flow Designer library for Google Chat is now complete! Zaxxon adds a new "Invite to Chat Space" step that lets you invite Google users and groups to a chat space.  

You can now enhance and streamline your collaborations by creating a space, inviting members, and posting messages to Google Chat as part of your flows.

BMC Helix ITSM Incidents trigger & Get Incidents step

Availability: Now available in xMatters

To enhance your integration with BMC Helix ITSM and Remedy, we've added new steps to Flow Designer:

• BMC Helix ITSM Incidents trigger: Easily send incident alerts from BMC Helix ITSM or Remedy using its built-in webhook feature to a Flow Designer workflow.
• Get Incident step: Retrieve details of a BMC Helix ITSM or Remedy incident to automate posting pertinent information in notifications, chat channels, or other locations.

Use these new steps, along with existing ones, to build more automation, streamline processes, and resolve incidents faster.

Get Conference Bridge step

Availability: Now available in xMatters

Getting everyone on a call at the same time can sometimes feel impossible, especially when that means ensuring the correct call information is communicated as quickly as possible. To help further automate your workflows, you can now use the Get Conference Bridge step to more easily retrieve details for existing xMatters or External conference bridges, allowing you to automatically include conference information in notifications, chat posts, or incident notes.

Microsoft Teams Create Online Meeting step (update)

In an ongoing effort to enhance security, Microsoft is deprecating certain features and modifying feature behaviors. One significant change is the new default requirement for a passcode when creating Teams online meetings. To ensure a smooth transition and minimize impact on your workflows, we've updated the Create Online Meeting step:

• Same behavior: The step overrides the default Teams setting to not require a passcode, maintaining the previous behavior of your flow.
• New input option: The new "Require Passcode" option lets you specify whether a passcode is required.
• New outputs: The new "Passcode" and "Meeting Entry Code" outputs let you pass the values to steps later in your flow.

These changes offer increased flexibility and security for your online meetings, without requiring immediate updates or adjustments to your flows.

Terraform provider

Availability: Early May

Introducing the xMatters Terraform Provider! This new offering gives you the ability to manage your xMatters instance configuration using Terraform. 

Initially, the xMatters provider supports managing:

• Services and service dependencies
• Users
• Devices
• Sites

You can also use data sources to query these objects and retrieve license usage information. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to update and expand the provider's capabilities. 

What is Terraform?

Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code tool that enables you to define and provision infrastructure using a high-level configuration language. With Terraform, you can manage both low-level components like compute instances, storage, and networking, as well as high-level components such as DNS entries and SaaS features.

For Terraform to interact with a particular system, you need to install a plugin, known as a provider, that is responsible for understanding how to read, create, update, and delete resources in the system.

The Terraform configuration process works like this:

• Write Configuration: Define your infrastructure configuration using HashiCorp Configuration Language(HCL) or JSON.
• Plan: Terraform generates the execution plan showing what the configuration will do and any preliminary validation warnings or errors.
• Apply: Terraform applies the configuration making any changes need to reach the desired state.
• Manage: Terraform can then manage the lifecycle of the configuration, including updates and deletions.

Recertification for Jira Data Center and ServiceNow Yokohama

As part of our commitment to staying current with the latest industry standards and applications, we've successfully attained recertification for Jira Data Center. We've also confirmed that the xMatters app 5.8.3 has been certified for the ServiceNow Yokohama release. Importantly, no alterations to functionality have taken place during the certification processes and there is no action required by our users.

Messaging

The xMatters messaging capabilities give users the ability to quickly populate predefined forms or scenarios and send notifications to recipients on their preferred devices. The Zaxxon release extends the option to validate devices for Stakeholder License users so they can test their device configurations and make sure they're ready to receive notifications.

Stakeholder license users can validate devices

Whenever you're adding new users or devices, it’s important to confirm that they're correctly configured by having users respond to a test notification on each of their devices. This is a great way to rest assured that a user will be able to receive their notifications, but what about Stakeholder users who are not able to respond to messages? 

With the Zaxxon release, users with a "Stakeholder" license type are now able to respond to test notifications from any device type. They will continue to be unable to respond to other notifications or initiate flows—but you can now be certain that their devices are configured and working as expected.

Reporting & analytics

The xMatters reporting capabilities provide visibility across your entire service mesh 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 insight into your xMatters environment by adding email triggers and sortable columns to the Triggers report and adding more group information to the System Audit report.

Triggers report enhancements

In addition to HTTP and scheduled triggers, the Triggers report now includes email triggers so you can quickly assess and manage your email-based workflows. The report provides streamlined access to your email triggered workflows and their canvasses, last initiation information, and the email address used for each trigger. You can also enable or disable triggers from the triggers report without needing to open the workflow.

We've also added the ability to sort columns within the Trigger report, making it much faster and easier to find specific triggers, whether you're looking for a specific type, triggers that haven't been initiated in a while, or active versus inactive triggers.

Group audit reports

The Zaxxon release wraps up our work on group audits for the System Audit report, giving you a complete, detailed view into how your groups are used with xMatters. You can now see changes to group observers, whether groups are externally owned, which groups have been copied, and changes to  dynamic groups. 

And if that wasn't enough, we've also enhanced the performance of the System Audit Report by making it faster and more reliable when handling larger datasets. Next up for the System Audit Report: shifts!

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 Zaxxon, we're updating the look and feel and enhancing the usability of the user schedule view.

Enhanced user schedule

The xMatters mobile app is getting a new user schedule list view, bringing it into alignment with the same view in the web user interface. The new layout features an indicator to let you know at a glance what your current on-call status is, and makes it easier to see what your upcoming shifts look like.

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 ahead. As always, detailed information and instructions for using these new features will be available in our online documentation.

What's next?

We really hope you've enjoyed our journey through retro video games—we sure have! While "Z" for Zaxxon means we've run out of letters for video game themed releases, we're certainly not going to stop innovating on and building the best service reliability and incident resolution platform in the business. Which means, of course, that we'll need a new theme...

After lengthy consideration, a lot of suggestions, several rounds of voting, and more passionate arguments than you'd probably expect, we're excited to announce that our next release naming theme will be mythical creatures and legendary beasts!

Please enjoy everything we've packed into the Zaxxon release, and we're looking forward to seeing you again soon for Alicanto...

 

 

 

 

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.