About Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments. Founded in 2017, Sensu offers a comprehensive monitoring solution for enterprises, providing complete visibility across every system, every protocol, every time from Kubernetes to bare metal.

Sensu provides users with a single and central platform from which to manage availability and application performance monitoring. Sensu offers a free and open source Sensu Core framework, as well as the commercially supported Sensu Enterprise. The Sensu Enterprise solution includes features like service checks and metrics, Prometheus and Nagios compatibility, alerts and incident management, plus Active Directory and enterprise-grade integrations (ServiceNow, Jira, Splunk). Sensu helps users maintain complete visibility over their entire infrastructure for both public and private cloud. Users can collect container and application metrics and store them anywhere (ElasticSearch, Splunk, etc.).


Key benefits of Sensu

• Monitor everything from containers and cloud compute instances to bare metal and even mainframes.

• Manage availability and application performance monitoring from a single and central platform.

• Users can integrate with their existing tools like ElasticDB, Grafana, InfluxDB, helping to streamline the user-workflow.

• Automated alerts through email, PagerDuty and Slack enable users to create and resolve incidents as and when they happen.

• Collect and store container and application metrics anytime, anywhere via ElasticSearch, Splunk and InfluxDB.


Images

Sensu Software - 1
View 1 more
Sensu Software - 1

Not sure about Sensu? Compare with a popular alternative

Sensu

4.8 (13)
VS.
Highly reviewed

Starting Price

US$600.00
month
US$129.00
month

Pricing Options

Free version
Free trial
Free version
Free trial

Features

28
145

Integrations

5
22

Ease of Use

4.5 (13)
4.6 (417)

Value for Money

4.8 (13)
4.6 (417)

Customer Service

4.7 (13)
4.5 (417)
Green rating bars show the winning product based on the average rating and number of reviews.

Alternatives

Atera

4.6
#1 Alternative to Sensu
Atera is the all-in-one IT management platform that combines RMM, Helpdesk, and ticketing with AI to boost organizationa...

N-central

3.9
#2 Alternative to Sensu
N-able N-central® is an endpoint detection and response software designed to help managed service providers (MSPs)...

Site24x7

4.7
#3 Alternative to Sensu
Monitor your entire application stack from URL's to databases with complete visibilty with Site24x7 APM Insight....

Zabbix

4.7
#4 Alternative to Sensu
Zabbix offers great performance for data gathering and can be scaled to very large environments. Distributed monitoring...

Reviews

Overall rating

4.8 /5
(13)
Value for Money
4.8/5
Features
4.5/5
Ease of Use
4.5/5
Customer Support
4.7/5

Already have Sensu?

Software buyers need your help! Product reviews help the rest of us make great decisions.

Showing 5 reviews of 13
Sayanta
Sayanta
Overall rating
  • Industry: Research
  • Company size: 51–200 Employees
  • Used for Free Trial
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

A nice product

Reviewed on 2021/03/07

The overall experience with this software is really good and I recommend everyone to use it.

The overall experience with this software is really good and I recommend everyone to use it.

Pros

Sensu is one of the most amazing Software that turn key observability and pipelines for DevOps and SRE team. The most important thing I like about this software is the Sensu's end to end observability pipeline with which we can collect, filter and transform monitoring events.

Cons

There are literally nothing that I don't like about this software. This is really a good pipelining tool.

Christian
Overall rating
  • Industry: Information Technology & Services
  • Company size: 51–200 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

Awesome monitoring framework with unlimited integration possibilities

Reviewed on 2019/03/27

Sensu Go is a powerful framework to build an event pipeline tailored to the needs of their users....

Sensu Go is a powerful framework to build an event pipeline tailored to the needs of their users. Events can be gathered via various different ways and processed highly accurate via handlers. Sensu Go has its strength in dynamic environments and when it is interconnected with other tools of the IT environment used by administrators and managers.

Pros

The monitoring framework following the microservice approach gives users the ability to fully embed Sensu Go into their environment and workflows. The strengths of Sensu Go consist in giving users endless possibilities to process events using the event pipeline with filters and mutators. Handlers represent the integration to 3rd party tools, which could be everything you can think of. Every event is processed as a json object, what makes it very easy to build interfaces between Sensu Go and $product - you name it. On the other hand the agent is able to gather information in different ways. It supports several plugin output formats, what gives the possibility to choose from a pool of thousands plugins, scraping Prometheus Exporters, or just using in-house developments. Furthermore it supports to accept events/metrics via Agent API or the built-in StatsD listener. The documentation is awesome and complete. Since it is API-driven, users are able to fully automate Sensu Go using configuration management tools like Ansible, Chef, Puppet or Salt. The slack community is big and you can get help quickly.

Cons

Coming from classic montioring tools it takes some time to understand how Sensu Go works, but it's definitely worth it. At the moment Sensu Go brings some in-built filters (and simple filter examples in the docs) and some maintained handlers. If users want to go beyond that they need to look for community-implementations or write own filter expressions and handlers, what assumes that they are able to script or understand javascript (for filter expressions), golang or any other programming language (for handlers). What sounds like a con in one way is a pro in another, because it gives the user endless possibilities.

Justin
Overall rating
  • Industry: Computer Software
  • Company size: 51–200 Employees
  • Used Daily for 6-12 months
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 7.0 /10

Big improvement over Nagios, but still room for growth

Reviewed on 2019/07/09

After maintaining a Nagios XI installation for a few years, I decided to switch to Sensu because I...

After maintaining a Nagios XI installation for a few years, I decided to switch to Sensu because I can tell that Nagios is a creaking giant that doesn't meet the needs of the modern world especially well without a *lot* of elbow grease.

Sensu's backend and deployment is considerably easier than Nagios, but the GUI and documentation still need a lot of work.

Some of Sensu's best features, like assets, tarballs that package up programming language runtimes for easy deployment, aren't easy for smaller teams like mine to implement because the documentation talks about them as if you already know how to implement them.

I've already been in touch with our Sensu account manager, and to their credit, they arranged for a meeting with one of their higher-ups to discuss our concerns. I think Sensu still has room for improvement before it's a truly good fit for a small business environment like mine, but it's still a solid improvement in some ways over what I was using with Nagios XI.

Pros

Sensu Go, the new version, is easy to deploy, and it's considerably easier to manage and scale as compared to Nagios, which we had been using.

Cons

The GUI interface still needs a lot of work; it's quite spartan compared to Nagios XI. The documentation isn't especially beginner-friendly; it lacks "hello world" examples and seems to assume that you're already intimately familiar with some of the concepts.

Ben
Overall rating
  • Industry: Computer Software
  • Company size: 201–500 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

Best monitoring Framework, not the best monitoring product

Reviewed on 2019/03/15

I have used sensu for 4+ years and have become a maintainer in the last couple years. I really love...

I have used sensu for 4+ years and have become a maintainer in the last couple years. I really love seeing the diverse use cases that sensu helps organizations accomplish with core features as well as the community maintained plugins. Sensu has a really great community where I have had the benefit of leveraging many community contributions but been able to give back to such an awesome community. If you ever want to get involved with `core`, `sensu-plugins`, or the various CM (config management) projects reach out to me on the community https://slack.sensu.io

Pros

While many monitoring solutions try to be an out of box solution that is easy to get going and perform a prescriptive path Sensu took a step back and said instead of building a product we should build a framework. By taking the stance of framework first and product second what you get is a truly great experience where things work with little to no effort to get it spun up and going you can do so much more with it than the developers ever imagined people would use it. If you are willing to write code you can do pretty much anything you want by leveraging their framework and event pipeline. This can include writing new checks, metric gathering scripts, TSDB shippers, automated triage, automated remediation, etc.

Cons

Losing a lot of flexibility with filters in the transition from `sensu-ruby` to `sensu-go` but for most use cases you probably won't notice.

Jared
Overall rating
  • Industry: Computer Software
  • Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

A powerful monitoring event pipeline

Reviewed on 2019/06/03

Pros

Sensu provides an extremely flexible monitoring event pipeline for users of all sizes. Sensu is available as an open source, MIT licensed product allowing even the smallest organizations to leverage Sensu to provide a robust and flexible monitoring pipeline for all of their environments. Additionally, Sensu provides enterprise features (LDAP, AD, native external integrations) along with an incredible support team for their enterprise version.

Sensu provides native primitives that allow users to significantly reduce alert fatigue via filters, dependencies, aggregations, and scheduled silences. These primitives increase the value of Sensu monitoring event pipelines allowing "robots" to do the initial alert remediation and only notifying a human when there's real issues.

Cons

Sensu Core and Sensu Go both provide dashboards. In my experience, the larger the Sensu installation, the harder the provided dashboards become to use. However, Sensu Go now has native RBAC controls and appears to be significantly improving the dashboard with each release.

Alternatives Considered

Nagios XI, Datadog, Zabbix and Nagios Core
Showing 5 reviews of 13 Read all reviews

Sensu FAQs

Below are some frequently asked questions for Sensu.

Sensu offers the following pricing plans:

  • Starting from: US$600.00/month
  • Pricing model: Free Version, Subscription
  • Free Trial: Available

Starts at $600 per month, free up to 100 devices.

Sensu has the following typical customers:

2–10, 11–50, 51–200, 201–500, 501–1,000, 1,001–5,000

Sensu supports the following languages:

English

Sensu supports the following devices:

Sensu integrates with the following applications:

JIRA Service Management, Jira, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Slack

Sensu offers the following support options:

Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Phone Support, 24/7 (Live rep), Chat

Related categories

See all software categories found for Sensu.