xMatters Incident Management Tool Adds Stackdriver Integration

xMatters, an automated incident management tool provider, has integrated its eponymous product with Google Cloud Stackdriver, providing cloud developers, administrators and operators with more customizable and sophisticated event response processing.

xMatters is, according to the company, "an integration-driven collaboration platform that accelerates incident response and resolution...to proactively prevent outages, resolve issues, and keep the right people informed."

"Automating incident management is about being able to respond to incidents as quickly as possible--ideally, proactively," said Adam Serediuk, director of operations at xMatters.

And the company doesn't just sell its xMatters tool, Serediuk noted: "We use xMatters ourselves to handle our own IT events. xMatters integrates the tools that generate alerts, update status, share information and resolve issues."

Stackdriver is a cloud monitoring, logging and alerting platform. Originally developed in 2012 to help companies monitor apps and services on Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, Stackdriver was acquired by Google in 2014.

According to xMatters, "The xMatters integration with Stackdriver moves developers away from receiving simple 'something is broken' notifications to smart alerts that take advantage of all the context and diagnostic information that the full breadth that Stackdriver suite provides, and arms them with actions that connect them to all of the other systems that they would use while working an incident including Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, and 100s of others."

xMatters integrates with hundreds of third-party IT management, security and DevOps tools, including AIOps tools like Big Panda and Moogsoft, and is being used everywhere from DevOps teams and small workgroups through enterprises including BMC Software, Credit Suisse, Intuit, NVIDIA, and Sony Network Entertainment.

"You can create simple but compelling alerting out of the box, watching things like service level objectives indicators," said xMatters' Serediuk. "For example, Google's Kubernetes Engine has a close integration with their Stackdriver monitoring. So you can monitor that data to receive alerts and pre-emptive warnings for when something goes wrong, like capacity checks are having issues."

The xMatters/Stackdriver integration helps developers and operators keep a better eye on rapidly iterating and deployed applications. "Stackdriver is receiving all this metric information from the things it's monitoring, like from Kubernetes, from load balancers, etc.," said Serediuk. "You define alerts in Stackdriver, which are sent to xMatters via this new integration, and xMatters sends alerts to your teams, and wherever else you've told it to, including other tools. xMatters replaces manual steps in your incident reporting and response process."

Serediuk added that Stackdriver also can be used with Amazon Web Services, VMware servers and other environments.

xMatters' Stackdriver integration is available now, as a new feature in xMatters, at no additional cost. xMatters is priced per user, starting at free for limited features for up to 15 users, with additional features and support currently for up to $59/user/month.