Get High-Performance, Enterprise-Class Observability With Sensu Go

Sensu offers a complete solution for infrastructure monitoring and observability, designed to give you visibility into all of your important infrastructure components, including containers, applications, traditional server closets, and the cloud. Sensu Go is a commercial product based on an open source core that is freely available under a permissive MIT License and publicly available on GitHub. Our commitment to open source means that every organization can take advantage of Sensu’s observability pipeline and open integration marketplace to unify data collection, consolidate infrastructure monitoring tools, and eliminate observability data silos.

For open source and commercial users, Sensu provides meaningful, context-rich alerts that speed up incident response and reduce alert fatigue. Sensu subscriptions automatically coordinate the appropriate checks for different components of your monitoring infrastructure. Sensu agents automatically register and deregister themselves so you can collect observation data about ephemeral infrastructure without getting overloaded with alerts. With built-in support for industry-standard metric formats like Prometheus metrics format, InfluxDB line protocol, and Nagios performance data, Sensu can collect metrics and status data and route observation data to external data stores for long-term storage and analysis.

Sensu Commercial supercharges these open source capabilities with features designed for flexible, powerful monitoring and observability at scale. Sensu’s commercial features include real-time dashboards in the web UI, mutual transport layer security (mTLS) agent authentication, single sign-on (SSO) authentication, high-performance event processing, secrets management, and more. Read on to learn more about Sensu’s commercial features and get started with Sensu Commercial.

Sensu Commercial features

Sensu’s commercial features are available in the official Sensu Go distribution, and you can use them for free as long as you stay under the 100-entity limit. Here, we’ll describe the features in some detail – to compare Sensu Go open-source and commercial versions at a glance, review the Open Source vs Commercial comparison matrix.

50+ commercially supported plugins and integrations

Sensu plugins and integrations provide executable scripts that you can use as Sensu checks, handlers, and mutators. Our commercial plugins and integrations cover every functionality, from standard system checks and metrics collection to pipelines for sending Sensu data to third-party logging, remediation, and incident management services. Use supported plugins and integrations to integrate Sensu with the platforms and tools you’re already using to control costs, eliminate data silos, improve observability, and reduce multi-cloud tool sprawl.

In addition to thousands of community-contributed plugins, Sensu customers get access to more than 50 commercially-supported plugins and integrations in Bonsai, the Sensu asset index, and the Sensu Catalog, an online marketplace for monitoring and observability integrations. The Sensu Catalog is part of the Sensu web UI, so you can find, configure, and install integrations directly from your browser, which greatly simplifies new user onboarding. Catalog integrations include baseline configurations so you can deploy Sensu’s comprehensive infrastructure and application monitoring solutions in minutes.

Web UI with real-time dashboards

The Sensu web UI provides a unified, single-pane-of-glass view of your entities, events, and Sensu resources. Commercial users can view real-time incident and inventory dashboards, as well as multi-tenant (single-site) and multi-site (federated) dashboards.

The web UI also offers real-time configuration management with resource management dashboards for Sensu events, entities, business services, and configuration resources (like checks and pipelines), as well as a user-friendly silencing tool. Use the Sensu web UI to manage events and entities, and create, edit, and delete checks, event filters, handlers, mutators, pipelines, silences, and business services.

The web UI is also configurable, so you can tailor global default settings for page size and theme, create page-specific settings for page size, order, and selector, and use customized sign-in messages.

Agent authentication via mutual transport layer security (mTLS)

Commercial users can configure mutual transport layer security (mTLS) authentication to provide two-way verification for Sensu agents and backend connections. With mTLS authentication, agents do not need to send password credentials to backends when they connect. mTLS provides an extra layer of security and allows you to use secrets management to protect sensitive information.

Secrets management

Use Sensu’s secrets management to authenticate without exposing sensitive information in your Sensu configuration. When a Sensu resource requires secrets like a username and password, you can retrieve the secrets from one or more secrets providers instead of providing them directly in the resource definition. Sensu automatically redacts secrets from all logs, the API, and the web UI.

Sensu Commercial includes a built-in secrets provider, Env, that exposes secrets from environment variables on your Sensu backend nodes. Our packages also support CyberArk Conjur and HashiCorp Vault as external secrets providers so you can integrate Sensu with the secrets management tools and strategies you’re already using.

Single sign-on with AD, LDAP, and OIDC authentication

In addition to basic authentication, Sensu offers commercial support for single sign-on authentication with Active Directory (AD), Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), or OpenID Connect 1.0 protocol (OIDC). Use Sensu Commercial to improve security and give your users a more manageable way to authenticate.

Multi-site federation

Register external clusters, gain unified, single-pane-of-glass visibility into the health of your infrastructure and services across multiple distinct Sensu instances, and mirror your changes in one cluster to follower clusters with federation. Sensu’s federation feature gives you a single entry point for managing your application and infrastructure monitoring across different data centers, cloud regions, and providers.

Commercial support with an SLA

Sensu Commercial users can get enterprise-class support with a service level agreement (SLA) that guarantees a 3-hour response and next-business-day resolution for Level 1 issues. Our expert in-house team is available if you need it, with best-in-class support to get you up and running and keep it that way. Visit https://sensu.io/support for more details about commercial support options.

Access to compiled binaries

Our supported packages and Docker images are provided under the Sensu commercial license for streamlined installation. Sensu Commercial ready-to-use software packages are tested and verified — plus, they save you the time and hassle of collecting the required source files and producing your own compiled binaries.

API response filtering using field and label selectors

The Sensu API includes commercial support for filtering responses based on resource attribute values and metadata labels. Powerful field and label selector filtering is designed for large installations to make sure you can retrieve exactly what you need, right within the Sensu API — even if you have hundreds of Sensu events and entities.

High-performance event processing with PostgreSQL support

Achieve enterprise-scale event handling for your Sensu instance with a PostgreSQL event store. Use Sensu’s commercial PostgreSQL datastore to monitor tens of thousands of nodes and process many thousands of events per second.

Access the PostgreSQL event datastore with the same Sensu web UI, API, and sensuctl processes as etcd-stored events, but with much higher rates of event processing.

Get started with Sensu Commercial

Sensu Commercial is the enterprise-scale monitoring and observability solution for your complex, distributed infrastructures.

All of Sensu’s commercial features are free for your first 100 entities. For a free trial of Sensu Commercial for more than 100 entities, sign up here or contact our Sales team. Follow our Install Sensu guide to install Sensu Go for proof-of-concept and testing purposes. Then, use our self-paced workshop lessons to take a deep dive into Sensu’s capabilities and features.

When you’re ready to put Sensu Commercial into production, download your commercial license file from your Sensu account and use Sensu’s command line tool to activate your commercial license. Our documentation walks you through how to get the most out of all of Sensu’s commercial features, whether you’re securing Sensu with mTLS authentication, setting up a single sign-on application with AD, LDAP, or OIDC, configuring secrets management, or deploying PostgreSQL for high-performance event processing.