RedFlag is presented as an easy to use multi-channel emergency mass notification system that allows users to deliver real time alerts and critical information to groups of any size. The emergency mass notification system can be used by small businesses up to enterprise corporations to gain visibility into events happening in the field, efficiently coordinate resources, and make data-based decisions.
$250
per month
Zabbix
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Zabbix is an open-source network performance monitoring software. It includes prebuilt official and community-developed templates for integrating with networks, applications, and endpoints, and can automate some monitoring processes.
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.
Zabbix is great for monitoring your servers and seeing alerts when the system uses too much CPU or memory. This allowed the system Engineer to be proactive and add resources to these systems to avoid interrupting the services. Especially servers running operations applications and services. This is one of the best usages for Zabbix.
Collecting hardware data - CPU, Memory, Network, and Disk Metrics are collected and reported on.
Flexible design - It is very easy to build out even very large environments via the templating system. You can also start where you are - network monitoring, server monitoring, etc. and then build it out from there as time and resources permit.
Provides a "plugin architecture" (via XML templates) to allow end users to extend it to monitor all kinds of equipment, software, or other metrics that are not already added into the software already.
Very complete documentation. Almost every aspect of Zabbix has been documented and reported on.
Cost - Zabbix is FOSS software and always free. Support is reasonably priced and readily available.
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.
It is free. It didn't cost anything to implement (other than my time and the cost incurred for it) and it is filling a badly needed gap in our IT infrastructure. Support is available if we have issues and can be done annually or paid for on a per incident basis as needed. Expansion, updates, and all other future lifecycle activities are likewise free of cost, so as long as someone is able to implement/maintain the software (and the OSS project is maintained) then I imagine the company will never leave it.
I think every organization, especially the IT department, needs a tool like this. I know of another product like Zabbix that gives a similar or the same solution, but its range makes it very useful. You can see almost all the device info in one place: disk usage, disk space, network usage, etc.
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.
The setup is the most time-consuming portion of using zabbix. It takes a lot of effort to shape it into a usable format and even then it can get very messy. It's not exactly intuitive and as mentioned the UI seems a bit antiquated. If I was to roll out a monitoring solution from scratch, I'd probably look for alternatives which are easier to use and maintain.
We are a mainly Windows environment, so it would be useful if we could have used Active Directory to deploy agents. As of version 4.2, Zabbix has announced a new agent MSI file to allow exactly that. Unfortunately, we didn't have that option. Also, for Linux and MAC deployments, there is no simple way to deploy that. Using remote scripts you may be able to create something, but most places will opt for either SNMP (agentless) or manual installation of agents to add to Zabbix. A way of deploying agents via discovery would go a long way to helping in the adoption of the tool.
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're using the Solarwinds suite as our global monitoring standard, but it is very complex and its licensing model makes it difficult to monitor a wide range of technologies. So, we're using Zabbix as a complement on our monitoring process. Zabbix is a way more flexible and has free integrations to a wide range of technologies. It is also more 'user friendly' and easy to manage.
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.
