AlertMedia vs. PagerDuty vs. xMatters

The AlertMedia platform helped us with several key events, including an F3 tornado near one of our sites and a police situation in a residential neighborhood near our office. With both events, the mapping features allowed us to quickly understand our associates who may be impacted/affected and follow-up with them in a timely and efficient manner.

Incentivized

I think PagerDuty works great for medical practices. I have used other platforms through other companies, and PagerDuty is by far the best platform. It is because of the different features it has to communicate to other staff members how the call is being handled. It is easy to learn how to use.

Incentivized

We use xMatters for our alerting on critical matters. ServiceNow is our incident management system and it ties into xMatters. When a critical alert is generated it will notify the appropriate party. I'm trying to see if two other departments can use it. We are looking for a refrigeration system and for weather alerts when bad storms are coming

Incentivized

• Supports multiple countries with local or short code access numbers
• Very quickly sends multimodal messages simultaneously
• Provides good feedback for message sending, including options to resend to non-responsive people
• Very good Threat Intelligence options, including immediate notifications through subscriptions, and weekly TI summaries.

• Alerting notifications is its best attribute; it will continue to make contact until the alert is acknowledged by a user.
• The calendar view provides valuable information regarding who is on call by the team and their full contact information.
• The application also lets you initiate a tech bridge meeting instantly and notifies all on-call users.

Incentivized

• Close to real-time alert notifications over preferable options, like phone call, text, email, or app notification.
• Automated incident communication about critical system outages based on alerts received in the system.
• Automated on-call roster and notification deliveries to SME.

Incentivized

• A build-in template for notifications about various activities (weather, injury, etc.) would help make alerts more systematic in both appearance and content.

Incentivized

• When getting a phone call, PagerDuty doesn't seem to allow acknowledgments of alerts through the phone, which it says it does. I constantly receive a message that it was updated by another person - when in reality, it wasn't.
• Smarter notifications. If an alert was snoozed for a time, when it comes back, it sends out another alert. It should, I think, send a message asking if the alert is still an issue and give the option to close.
• Make schedule changes more intuitive.
• One button to acknowledge and close an alert.

Incentivized

• granular notification settings
• Allowing users to create custom integration templates would provide more flexibility and control over how xMatters integrates with their systems
• Additional built-in integrations with other applications would be an area of improvement.

They have been rock solid for us thus far and are not very expensive and to be honest no time to evaluate other software at this point.

Incentivized

Easy to use platform. App is very simple and very mobile friendly

Incentivized

The UI is more complex than I would like. Part of the challenge is that most users use PagerDuty infrequently; I don't remember how I changed a policy last time. Another part of the challenge is that some users expect alerting to be a trivial feature, and are reluctant to invest any time in reading the documentation.

Incentivized

xMatters has a pretty good UI. However, its versatility does get in the way a little as the number of options can be overwhelming, and it sometimes takes a while to find the place you want, or get the result you want. I don't have any suggestions on how to fix this, it's just a side effect of the complexity that xMatters offers.

Incentivized

Support from AlertMedia has been ongoing and very accessible. Staff are consistently available and quick to respond. And I was developing an organization-wide training for this system, I called and spoke with a recruiter/trainer who emailed several training slides and helpful tips that I was able to convert into an online training.

Incentivized

PagerDuty is reliable and easy to set up. It gives an effective way to notify the team about critical incidents which results in a faster turnaround time on issues. users can customize their alerts rules based on their preferences. Overall it's effective and easy to use which adds great business value.

Incentivized

Working with xMatters support has been fantastic! Our support rep is very friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable. We get quick response times when asking questions, and when we have more complex problems, it's easy to schedule a call and spend some time working through our issues together. Every time we've had a problem we've been able to get the info we need and get a resolution easily.

Incentivized

When I setup notifications to PD thru the Python API I was impressed with the ease with which I could set up the software/service.

Incentivized

AlertMedia slightly edges out Rave for general notifications; Plus, AlertMedia has a very robust Threat Intelligence features that I'm not aware that Rave has.

I have not use the 2 technologies for as long as I have used PagerDuty but in my opinion PagerDuty makes things a lot easier. The other tools got the job done and got alerts out but PagerDuty just seemed to make the setup for on-call alert schedules and integrations easier than the others. This isn't to say the others are difficult, just that PagerDuty was slightly better. I also have noticed that more tools have options to integrate to PagerDuty over the other tools.

Incentivized

xMatters is a market leader among many new burgeoning products in the stakeholder notification space. They are historically one of two original enterprise products in this space. Great client base of large companies and good reputation. xMatters offers flexible licensing models, depending on functional needs. It's easy to learn and use but slightly more difficult to administer.

Incentivized

• Efficiently notifying associates of issues affecting our sites
• Timely and efficient return to normal operations when sites have been down and are resuming operations
• Hurricane briefings

Incentivized

• Allow our service to be available 24/7 with minimal downtime, improving customer experience
• Monitor incidents and allow us to customize/schedule alert notifications, making engineers' jobs easier and preventing turnover
• Prevent SEVs that could deteriorate, bring down our service, and cost us millions of dollars from loss in bookings

Incentivized

• Quicker response times for on-call personnel.
• Managers are able to pull reports faster for any incidents escalated to their team.
• When needing to contact another on-call associate from another team, xMatters provides conference bridge lines. You don't have to set up meetings through Outlook or Skype.

Incentivized