Amazon CloudWatch vs. RedFlag

Cloud watch is great and essential if you decide to invest in AWS and have any need to monitor the health of all aspects of your VPC resources, or at the organizational level (multiple accounts). Another benefit of the service is constant upgrades at no additional costs; the software evolves to develop modules and interface improvements. For first-time users in AWS, this is going to take a bit to understand, so the learning curve to this metrics environment can seem overwhelming at first glance/use.

Incentivized

RedFlag is extremely helpful in all sorts of emergencies. Whether it's a fire, natural disaster, inclement weather, active shooter, or even a cyber attack, this tool can be used for emergency notifications during all these situations. It can also be used for internal communication. You can send out notifications based on location through geotargeting, message groups together, or have one-on-one communication too. It's a great tool for making business decisions as well. You can use its polling feature for the same.

• It provides lot many out of the box dashboard to observe the health and usage of your cloud deployments. Few examples are CPU usage, Disk read/write, Network in/out etc.
• It is possible to stream CloudWatch log data to Amazon Elasticsearch to process them almost real time.
• If you have setup your code pipeline and wants to see the status, CloudWatch really helps. It can trigger lambda function when certain cloudWatch event happens and lambda can store the data to S3 or Athena which Quicksight can represent.

Incentivized

• Inform people of critical situations
• Gain feedback and insights

• Memory metrics on EC2 are not available on CloudWatch. Depending on workloads if we need visibility on memory metrics we use Solarwinds Orion with the agent installed. For scalable workloads, this involves customization of images being used.
• Visualization out of the box. But this can easily be addressed with other solutions such as Grafana.
• By design, this is only used for AWS workloads so depending on your environment cannot be used as an all in one solution for your monitoring.

Incentivized

• Integration with pagers for communication. It’s not a big concern as only a few employees have requested for it. However, it’d help if RedFlag can implement that as well. I’m pretty sure they’ll; they keep coming up with updates regularly.
• Would love to see RedFlag go completely global.

Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use.

Incentivized

The support team for RedFlag is amazing. They are always there to address my needs and my dedicated account person is always working to help me. I think this is a differentiator for the company.

I believe that CloudWatch is a better solution to use with AWS services and resources in terms of cost and ease of integration with AWS infrastructure services. But keep in mind that Elasticsearch is better at aggregating application-level metrics. We chose CloudWatch because of its capabilities to integrate and monitor AWS services in almost real-time.

Incentivized

I found the team at RedFlag to be much more responsive and the features were more in line with what I needed. I also found the pricing to be much more in-line with my budget. It was the right solution for me.

• We were able to set up log streaming, retention, and simple downtime alerts within a few hours, having no prior experience with CloudWatch, freeing up our engineers to focus on more important business goals.
• CloudWatch log groups have made it relatively easy to detect and diagnose issues in production by allowing us to aggregate logs across servers, correlate failures, isolate misbehaving servers, etc. Thanks to CloudWatch, we are generally able to identify, understand and mitigate most production fires within 10-15 minutes.
• Choosing CloudWatch to manage log aggregation has saved us quite a bit of time and money over the past year. Generally, 3rd-party log aggregation solutions tend to get quite expensive unless you self-host, in which case you typically need to spend a fair amount of time setting up, maintaining, and monitoring these services.

Incentivized

• Positive as it has helped us reduce our emergency response time drastically. It’s also streamlined our internal communication and we’ve been able to reduce communication gaps to a great extent.
• Increased productivity due to ease of communication and quick decision making.