Sensu Review

Sensu
Product:
Vendor:
Founded:
Headquarters:
Sensu
Sensu
2017
Portland, OR
Ownership:
Customers:
Deployment Model:
Free Trial:
Private
Unknown
Cloud
Yes

Sensu At A Glance

Good: The open-source software is highly customizable and flexible with many use cases.
Bad: The dashboard and interface come with minimal features and require custom or community scripts, which can be difficult to implement and scale.
Bottom Line: Sensu is a cloud-based, open-source network monitoring tool that can provide flexibility and customization for companies with IT programming resources.

Product Overview

Sensu is an open-source network monitoring tool for servers, containers, services, applications, functions, and connected devices across public or private clouds. The solution can monitor server performance, bandwidth, uptime, network resources and event logs.

Key features include:

  • Alerts
  • Auto-remediation
  • Incident management
  • Network monitoring
  • Real-time inventory
  • Scheduling

Sensu is based on open-source software that’s distributed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The solution is free for organizations with up to 100 nodes and has over 200 community plugins and 250 integrations by subject matter experts. Paid plans with free trials are available for companies with more than 100 nodes.

Features

Sensu’s key features include:

Alerts – Send alerts based on event filters and contact routing via email, Slack, SMS, etc.

Auto-remediation – Trigger restarts or execute custom scripts when problems are detected. Automate repetitive operations by configuring custom workflows.

Incident management – Create and resolve incidents in PagerDuty, ServiceNow and Jira.

Network monitoring – Collect basic system metrics (CPU, memory and disk usage) and advanced application metrics for servers, containers, services, applications, functions, and connected devices across public and private clouds. Apply custom labels and annotations.

Real-time inventory – Automatically register virtual machines, public cloud compute instances, containers, etc. Integrate with third-party configuration management databases to create and update inventory asset records.

Scheduling – Schedule health checks, metric collection and automated operations.

Target Market

Sensu serves companies of all sizes around the globe. Some of its customers include:

  • Activision
  • Box
  • Doximity
  • Ericsson
  • Harvard University
  • Industrial Light & Magic
  • Netsmart
  • Sony
  • Uber
  • Yelp

Implementation/Integration

The vendor provides a quick-start guide on its website, which helps companies install the software in as little as 15 minutes.

The solution has over 200 community plugins and 250 integrations by subject matter experts.

Customer Service & Support

Sensu provides interactive tutorials, step-by-step guides and documentation in a resource library. The vendor also offers several tiers of customer support:

  • Free – Community support forum
  • Pro – Free support, plus email and web-based help-desk support with a six-hour response time available during business hours
  • Enterprise – Pro support, plus phone and dedicated account manager support with a three-hour response time available during business hours
  • Premium – Enterprise support, plus custom integrations and professional services with a one-hour response time available 24/7

Pricing

Sensu has three pricing plans based on number of nodes:

  • Free – Up to 100 nodes at an unlimited number of sites
  • Pro – $3 per node, per month (billed annually) for 200 to 2,000 nodes at one site, including Pro Support
  • Enterprise – $5 per node, per month (billed annually) for 300 nodes minimum at an unlimited number of sites, including Enterprise Support

The vendor also offers 30-day free trials.

Shortcomings

The out-of-the-box dashboard and interface offer minimal functionality. To get advanced features, users may need to implement community scripts or write their own. For companies with extensive monitoring needs, the dashboards can become difficult to navigate.

In addition, beginners may have difficulty understanding the complex technical documentation.

Screenshots

Sensu Screenshot 1
Sensu Screenshot 2
Sensu Screenshot 3

About

Sensu was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Portland, OR. The company is backed by several investors, including the Foundry Group and Battery Ventures.

The solution is based on open-source software that’s distributed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The open-source community behind Sensu has over 1,250 active Slack members and 5,000 GitHub Stars. The software has over 400,000 monthly installs.

Send feedback or corrections to feedback@betterbuys.com.

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