xMatters provides flexible, smart tools for incident response and management. With configurable workflows that bring together data from sources like Github, Jenkins, and Zendesk, you can automate crucial tasks and send enriched notifications to streamline team communications. Now, with our new integration, you can include Datadog alerts in your xMatters workflows and use them to trigger other services in your toolchain, ensuring that your team is alerted to issues across your environment the moment they arise.
In this post, we’ll look at how you can use Datadog alerts to initiate a response workflow and route vital information to the right people, and we’ll cover how to use xMatters webhooks from within Datadog to easily notify teams and share alerts. See our documentation for instructions on connecting Datadog to your xMatters flow.
Automate communications in a crisis
When an incident occurs, identifying and notifying the right people can add another layer of difficulty. With xMatters’ automated on-call management, you can simplify this by defining different individuals, groups, and devices to receive notifications according to severity. The system considers the timeframe set, recorded absences, and current rotations to decide who to contact. If the resource doesn’t respond within a set amount of time, it follows down the chain of command. By adding Datadog to your incident resolution workflow, you can route alerts from any of your monitors directly to xMatters’ scheduling system, ensuring that the right people are notified immediately and reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR).
When an alert from Datadog initiates an incident in xMatters, the notifications will include a description of the incident and a link to the event within Datadog where you can view timeseries graphs showing the relevant metrics at the time the alert occurred. With the xMatters flow designer, you can customize your workflows to collect data from other integrated apps like Github or Jenkins, so that the notification will show even more context, such as the latest commit and deployment information.
Manage your response from inside Datadog events
The Datadog event stream includes a real-time stream of any alerts generated by your monitors. You can easily search and filter events using tags, and Datadog automatically groups similar events. You can add comments to events in order to provide context, tag people and groups, and invoke webhooks to access integrated services like xMatters.
Adding @webhook-xmatters_on_call to an event displays the current escalation path for a given xMatters group directly inside the event. So, without having to exit the page, you can view the configured on-call schedule directly within Datadog to see the chain of command xMatters will follow in determining who to contact if there’s an issue.
The @webhook-xmatters_engage webhook triggers a notification stream to a named group or individual. For instance, if an app alert was found to have originated in one of your database systems, you could invoke @webhook-xmatters_engage Database to notify your organization’s Database team configured in xMatters.
Get started with xMatters in Datadog
With flexible incident response and management tools, xMatters helps you address and resolve issues efficiently. Now, by integrating Datadog alerts–including machine-learning based ones like anomaly detection and forecasting–into your workflows, you can get rich, up-to-date information from across your entire stack to the people who need it, making all the difference in the crucial first steps of responding to a crisis.
To get started, create a new incident resolution workflow in xMatters using Flow Designer. Once you’ve connected other integrations and assigned which users and groups will receive notifications, you can create webhooks that will link Datadog alerts with your xMatters workflows. Visit our documentation for more information on how to configure xMatters webhooks from inside Datadog. If you aren’t using Datadog yet, you can sign up here for a 14-day trial.
