The first step toward bringing a downed server back online or undoing a botched patch is finding the right person for the task, which is easier said than done in a large enterprise with thousands of employees. Alerting provider xMatters Inc. has carved out a respectable niche for itself helping organizations overcome the challenge that it’s now looking to expand with a new communications service targeted at application teams.

The venture-backed outfit sees an opportunity to capitalize on the introduction of technologies such as Docker and Vagrant into the development process. From its point of view, the growing amount of tooling used to support software projects is increasing operational complexity and can thereby heighten the chances of something going wrong. The risk is exaggerated by the fact that the trend toward automation is reducing release cycles so drastically that some tech-savvy firms are now pushing out new code dozens of times a day. Operating at such a pace makes engineers more prone to error, while also aggravating the damage that is wrought when a slip-up inevitably occurs.

After all, the more work can be done in a given time frame, the bigger the impact of an outage becomes. The new xMatters Integration Platform aims to help organizations resolve technical issues faster by feeding operational data from their development tools and infrastructure into the vendor’s flagship alerting system. The cloud-based platform then uses the information to automatically identify and contact the most appropriate worker to handle a given problem. It’s possible to customize the process based on considerations such as the location of a malfunction and the qualifications of the on-site administrative team.

If, as an example, a software vendor wants to prepare for the possibility of a remote division losing access to its internal development environment, the xMatters can be configured to ping the most senior networking professional at the affected location when a router malfunctions. The service is able to go a step further and notify another administrator in case their peer doesn’t respond within a few minutes. Added up across all the technical issues that crop throughout an enterprise during the average month, the functionality can potentially save developers a lot of hassle and improve productivity in the process.

Image via Geralt