Squadcast vs. Splunk On-Call vs. xMatters

We tied Squadcast into our CI/CD pipeline for Airflow monitoring of workflows, and had it looking for failures and specific jobs. Then communicating out to a resource group with automated no answer or response next person communication. A lot of tools stop at one generic communication, but Squadcast allows you to take it a step further.

Incentivized

Splunk On-Call has proved to be a great help in incident response within my organization. With the scheduling and assignment feature it is never in question which engineer is tasked with each assignment/incident. Being able to quickly and easily access all relevant logs greatly expedites incident resolution time. I would argue that the larger the environment and incident volume, the more important a tool such as this will prove to be.

Incentivized

xMatters reduces incident response time by finding the right person to solve the problem when system outages require you to manage on-call schedules and escalations Avoid alert fatigue: reduce the noise with targeted notifications; alerts go only to the people that need them. Manage issues from anywhere: full-featured mobile apps allow you to stay in control wherever you are.

• Allows you to configure monitoring on events across the enterprise
• Very flexible in the channels that you can communicate to - i.e. Slack, Email, SMS, etc...
• Provides integrations into the systems that you use on a daily basis
• Has a very easy to use online interface that comes with little to no learning curve

Incentivized

• Easily assign work/tickets between multiple users
• Supports a wide variety of software integrations
• Easy to manage scheduling tool
• As part of the Splunk toolset, provides detailed levels of data analysis at our engineers fingertips

Incentivized

• API calls, we can create an API ourselves to integrate with other applications. This allows more teams to be notified of a critical alert instead of waiting for someone to call them when a problem is reported.
• The on-call schedule where you might need to have a replacement is fairly simple. You can easily change with someone else and still keep the rest of the schedule in place. It also sends an email to the person you are trading with so they know when they are on-call.
• Their support team is really helpful and quick to respond when you open a ticket. There hasn't been an issue that hasn't been resolved in less than a day. They stay really on-top of things.

Incentivized

• Can be costly depending on how deep your budget is!
• Support is not always the best

Incentivized

• The user interface can be furthe improved
• Licensing needs to be simplified and packaged as a bundle with other Splunk product like Enterprise Security
• Customer outreach can be further enhanced

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

It was a good solution with a good comprimise prize/features for our use cases

Incentivized

Not a lot of love given to VO since the acquisition by Splunk from my POV

Incentivized

xMatters giving highly rated due to its effectiveness in incident management and service reliability, as well as its strong integrations with other IT management tools. It helps teams proactively prevent outages, resolve incidents faster, and keep stakeholders informed. It's known for its ease of use, fast implementation, and good support

VictorOps support has proven excellent for us. Because it is such a widely used tool, there is a lot of documentation on usage, and a large community of users to lean on. Also, many engineers have had experience working with VictorOps already, and the tool is so easy to setup / manage that much support isn't really necessary.

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

It was a good solution with a good comprimise prize/features for our use cases

Incentivized

Squadcast is a much more user friendly product that works with multiple platforms and tools. I can't say this easily for the other tools that I've used

Incentivized

Splunk is more intelligent, easy, and faster compared to other tools in the market. Easy to configure, and customization can be done easily. It's more user-friendly, and it adds more value when I mention about the navigation panel. Multi-level escalations and root cause analysis is done in an intelligent way. Troubleshooting is faster.

Incentivized

I pushed for xMatters over PagerDuty for a couple things. Their sales team showed me everything I needed to hear from how simple their integration would be to our ServiceNow instance. The process flows of what we could do compared to what we have made a world of difference. We had a list of wants we came up with and xMatters delivered on all of them. The use of their app is very user friendly. Of course the cost played a big factor as well. With PagerDuty we basically had the bare minimum so we were limited with what we could do without having to pay more. xMatters was almost half the cost of what we were paying and we got back more in return. Personally, I felt more wanted by xMatters, even by having them a year the account managers check in with us almost bi-weekly. I did not get the same comfort from PagerDuty until we tried cancelling our service with them.

Incentivized

• Squadcast has allowed us to reduce cost of an incident overall by reducing time to find an issue, communicate, and get an assigned resource.
• Squadcast has created an increased awareness among teams in the enterprise of services and processes.

Incentivized

• Saved hundreds of IT worker hours utilizing a single platform
• More cohesive support SLA from IT support teams
• Reduced time updating on-call modifications
• Synchronized update cycle

Incentivized

• xMatters has helped to remove the need to monitor multiple alerting tools, as critical events are automatically notified from it.
• xMatters has helped teams to focus on more productive tasks than simply notifying someone about some event.
• xMatters has helped teams to enhance their remote working capabilities by giving more power to properly manage the system outages.

Incentivized