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.
Because we spread out in different locations, we can't always know the status of our devices. Zabbix solves this issue for us. As soon as we see an alert that the remote site is down, we can solve it right away. I can't think of a scenario where it was less appropriate for us.
Alerts; Zabbix allows deep customization of conditions and alerts giving you the ability to perform nearly any scripted action in a variety of scenarios
Inventory; having one place to see a list of all on-going problems and list of servers within your organization is critical
Graphs; screens or graphs showing customizable and color-coded historical usage is a necessity in any monitoring software
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.
Well i find the tool quite useful for my daily network monitoring purpose. We get the alerts easily through SMS which saves us lot of our times and effort. The tool is highly customizable which i mentioned earlier which helps to create different alert criteria for different device or system.
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.
The software's I mentioned are great, but they are overpriced comparing to Zabbix while it's a free open-source application. The value its adding has high price than any other free open-source apps. the monitoring and alerts details and the friendly user interface is stacking up against any other apps in the web.
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.
Zabbix has had a positive impact on uptime of our external facing website. Users don't always call up our Customer Service team to report that something is down - sometimes they just abandon the website all together. By having a monitoring solution that tells us when things are down before customers do, we are able to respond quickly and avoid losing visitors and ultimately sales.
