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David Eagle, enterprise monitoring manager for Pacific Life, talks about how xMatters initially supported after-hours notifications. Today, xMatters touches the entire organization — and Pacific Life hasn’t had a major outage in the four years with xMatters.
In this video, Eagle talks about how xMatters initially supported after-hours notifications. Today, xMatters touches the entire organization — and Pacific Life hasn’t had a major outage in the four years with xMatters.
And xMatters is no longer limited to open systems engineers. Now xMatters supports Pacific Life’s main frame first responders, main frame engineers, and developers.
Eagle says really, xMatters supports anybody who’s supporting production systems, and the entire enterprise is getting a call from xMatters at one point or another.
The essentials of an incident management system
When you’re thinking about what the benefit of any notification system is, you really want a couple of things, Eagle says. You want consistent and reliable communication, and you want the ability for users to manage their escalation groups. Because if you have essential monitoring team that’s managing something as kind of straightforward and highly dynamic as an escalation group, you can really become a huge bottle-neck.
So Pacific Life wants its users to be able to do that, and that’s a tremendous value. Eagle says his group also wants a strong audit trail. “We want to be able to look in the system and understand who didn’t accept a call and who did,” he says. “Back when I was an on-call engineer, I didn’t like that as much, but now that I’m running things, it’s a really good thing to have.”
Reliability is hugely important for the lights-out notification system. “xMatters, in our environment, is really designed around not needing human intervention to get in touch with people, in case something that is down,” Eagle explains. “So if we can’t rely on the system sending out the notifications, we’re in a lot of trouble. xMatters has been really reliable for us. We’ve had no major outages in the four years that we’ve been on this asked platform. So, we’re extremely happy about that.”