Tag: alerts

xMatters Releases Enhanced Platform For Targeted Notifications To IT Teams For Operational Continuity

xMatters Inc. today announces the latest release of its cloud platform for enterprise alerts and notifications. Designed to deliver notifications and messaging that enable business continuity and the availability of mission-critical applications, xMatters enables IT teams to alert key stakeholders of service disruptions, technical issues, external emergencies or other sources of business and technology interruption. The new release features enhanced collaboration functionality, an upgraded integration agent, improved mobile support and messaging capabilities as well as increased data quality. The xMatters platform enables enhanced communication between teams encountering an incident that threatens to disrupt day to day operations by enriching the quality of the user interface for collaboration and its attendant messaging capability as illustrated below:

The screenshot above illustrates an incident that requires attention and an accompanying message to a team member to take ownership of the event in question given the unresponsiveness of a different team member. The xMatters user interface provides a method for the responsive team member to elaborate on the chosen course of action by way of a comment that correspondingly updates the larger, background reporting dashboard featuring blue, green and red squares. As shown above, today’s release illustrates features the ability to add two-way, free text notes about an incident as it unfolds. In addition, customers can configure xMatters deployments to notify immediate team members, vendors, senior management and executives as deemed appropriate. Importantly, xMatters also delivers enhanced integrations between the xMatters cloud and on premise enterprise applications both behind and outside the purview of corporate security and enterprise firewalls. The integration of the xMatters cloud with on premise applications enables IT teams to configurae notifications from xMatters by configuring rules that automatically identify issues such as a database failure or anomalies in network traffic. The conjunction of the ability of the xMatters cloud to automate application integrations with its rich user interface for collaboration and messaging renders today’s release an especially valuable addition to the exploding space of business continuity software. Expect xMatters to build on its early traction in the targeted notification space, particularly as the larger market for cloud-based collaboration software deepens its footprint within the enterprise.

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BigPanda Emerges From Stealth To Manage Deluge Of IT Alerts And Notifications

BigPanda today launches from stealth to tackle the problem of managing the explosion of alerts and notifications that IT administrators increasingly receive, daily, from myriads of applications and devices. The Mountain View-based startup integrates alerts and notifications from disparate sources into a consolidated data feed that parses unstructured data into structured data to create an aggregated alerts and notifications data repository. BigPanda’s proprietary analytics subsequently run against the integrated data repository to enable the creation of topologies and relationships, time-based analytics and statistical analytics as indicated by the screenshot of an incident dashboard below:

Examples of statistical analytics include probabilistic determinations that the concurrent appearance of notification A, B and C is likely to lead to outcome X as suggested by historical data about the conjunction of the notifications in question. The platform’s machine-learning technology incrementally refines its analytics in relation to incoming data and thereby iteratively delivers more nuanced analyses and visualizations of notifications-related data. Overall, the platform enables customers to more effectively manage the tidal wave of data from notifications that bombard the inboxes of IT administrators by facilitating the derivation of actionable business intelligence based on the aggregation of notifications from discrete systems and applications.

As told to Cloud Computing Today by BigPanda CEO Assaf Resnick, the platform integrates with monitoring systems such as New Relic, Nagios and Splunk and additionally provides REST API functionality to connect to different applications, deployment infrastructures and ITSM tools. Moreover, BigPanda today announces the finalization of $7M in Series A funding in a round led by Mayfield with additional participation from Sequoia Capital. The $7M funding raise brings the total capital raised by BigPanda to $8.5M, following upon a $1.5M pre-Series A seed round of funding from Sequoia Capital. Deployed as a SaaS application that runs on AWS infrastructure while leveraging a MongoDB NoSQL datastore, BigPanda fills a critical niche in the IT management space by delivering one of the few applications aimed at consolidated notification management and analytics. As applications, infrastructure components and networking devices proliferate with dizzying complexity in the contemporary datacenter, platforms like BigPanda are likely to morph into necessary components of IT management as a means of taming the deluge of notifications produced by disparate systems. Meanwhile, BigPanda’s early positioning in the notification-management space renders it a thought leader as well as a technology standout.