OpsGenie is an IT monitoring and incident response platform for development and operations teams, providing alerts and schedule management escalations. OpsGenie is now part of Atlassian since the late 2018 acquisition.
$0
up to 5 users
xMatters
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
xMatters is an IT alert management solution for enterprises. It is cloud-based incident management software that enables business processes or applications to trigger two-way communications (text, voice, email, SMS, etc.) during time-sensitive events.
Well suited for cases where you just need to alert relevant team members when alerts and incidents come in and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. Generally OpsGenie just forwards the alerts it receives and allows you to schedule team members to be on-call. It's good for that simple use case and extra helpful if you have Jira or Atlassian Open DevOps since it has nice integrations with those platforms and you can easily monitor ticket progress. If you don't have those, it would be good to check and see if they integrate with whatever you use to track tickets or bugs. The dashboarding and analytics are relatively basic so if you're looking for extensive and highly customizable analytics, this might not be the right solution.
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
OpsGenie New Jira design has made it difficult for those not familiar with that style.
OpsGenie could benefit from nested escalation flows for team schedules. Creating a product alert that uses and Tech Schedule as well as an Incident Manager Schedule that already exists would create less overhead and ease management.
While the Workflow's are one of xMatters's strengths, the complexity can make it difficult at times to get things configured properly and get the desired result.
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.
xMatters has a good support team that respond in a timely fashion within the agreed SLA with our company. They also have elaborate documentation on how to onboard xMatters in your organization, how to administer it and use it. They have very good fault mitigation capability which helps us to get quick recovery in case of system failures.
We also looked at PagerDuty but decided to go with OpsGenie as it had more features on the plan we needed compared to PagerDuty which would have required us to spend a lot more for what we felt were non-premium features. Everything felt like an add-on - automation for an additional $20 a user per month seemed like a lot on top of the base plan
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.
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.
