The next chapter: announcing the EOL schedule for Sensu Core 1.x and Sensu Enterprise 3.x

In case you missed it, Sensu Go became generally available in December 2018, and commercial support for Sensu Go became generally available just last month. With these major milestones now in our rearview mirror, it’s time to help our customers reach their own milestones of migrating from Sensu to Sensu Go.

The time has come to announce our end of life (EOL) schedule for the original version of Sensu: Sensu 1.x will reach EOL on December 31, 2019, over 8 years since its inception as an open source software project. It is with a tremendous sense of pride and gratitude for the amazing community that has grown up around the project that we close this chapter of Sensu history, and look ahead at the future that is Sensu Go.

Looking back

The Sensu platform reached the “version 1.0” milestone on July 11, 2017. In Sean’s announcement blog post, he shared some of the many enhancements we had made leading up to the 1.0 release and outlined our roadmap for additional enhancements to come in the second half of 2017. At that time we had already revealed a preview of “Sensu 2.0” several weeks earlier (in May 2017, at Monitorama), which was set to go into public beta in early 2018. Internally, our intention was that the improvements we committed to in the 1.0 blog post would be the end of the line for Sensu 1.x, and that we would begin to sunset Sensu 1.x over the 6-12 months following the first public releases of “Sensu 2.0.” By December of 2017 we confirmed these plans. The stated plan was that new feature development on Sensu 1.x had officially ended, and that “commercial support for Sensu 1.x will continue until 2020.”

Fast forward to 2019 and we’re happy to report that we have exceeded even our own expectations. Not only did we continue to ship 1.x enhancements throughout 2018, we just shipped a new feature release (version 1.7). Following the 1.7 release, any subsequent releases will be focused on bugfixes and security patches, up until December 31, 2019 when the https://github.com/sensu/sensu repository will be permanently frozen.

Moving forward

We have observed over the years that the majority of Sensu users upgrade frequently and stay up to date with our latest releases (usually within the most recent 2-3 versions). However, we also know that some users do not upgrade as quickly as we release, not to mention that migrating to an entirely new generation of a product like Sensu Go is typically more involved than a major or minor version upgrade. That said, many of our users are already using Sensu Go, or are at least in the process of migrating to Sensu Go. For those who need more time, we’re happy to have provided over 12 months from the Sensu Go GA release date to migrate from Sensu 1.x to Sensu Go.

We are also happy to confirm that commercial support for Sensu Enterprise (3.x) will continue through March 31, 2020. This means that paying customers will have an additional 90 days of support following the December 31, 2019 EOL of Sensu Core. This also means we will no longer sell new commercial support contracts for Sensu 1.x after March 31, 2019.

Existing customers are encouraged to contact their Account Manager or our Customer Reliability team with any questions related to our service offerings and to help you establish a migration path that’s right for your business. If you’d like to learn more about enterprise features in Sensu Go, please contact our sales team.

We’ll continue to communicate details about the EOL process and the impact it will have on our users in the coming months. In the interim, here are some helpful resources:

• The Sensu Community! The #sensu-go channel in the Sensu Community Slack is very active, with hundreds of users to help answer questions and share tips they picked up during their own migrations; click here to join the Sensu Community Slack. If YASO (Yet Another Slack Organization) isn’t your thing, feel free to drop a question in our Community Forum and someone will usually answer your question within a day or so. -Sensu Go documentation & guides The Sensu Go user documentation provides a great overview of the differences between Sensu 1.x and Sensu Go, including the Sensu Go architecture, API resources, links to upgrade guides, and more. Check out it out.
• The Sensu Go sandbox Download the Sensu Go sandbox to start building monitoring workflows with Sensu Go.
• Sensu Translator utility The Sensu Translator utility can be used to automatically generate Sensu Go configuration from your Sensu Enterprise config files. See: https://github.com/sensu/sensu-translator.
• Commercial support Commercial support for Sensu includes assistance with migrating workloads from Sensu 1.x to Sensu Go. Our Customer Reliability Team is standing by to help guide you through the process — you can reach out to them here.

NOTE: commercial support for Sensu Enterprise will continue through March 31, 2020. This means that paying customers will have an additional 90 days of support following the December 31, 2019 EOL of Sensu Core. This also means we will no longer sell new commercial support contracts for Sensu after March 31, 2019. If you anticipate your organization will require assistance to migrate to Sensu Go, obtaining commercial support before March 31, 2019 will be the most cost-effective path.

• Professional services Professional services packages for migrating to Sensu Go are available starting at $1,600 (for one day). Please contact your Account Manager or submit a request using this form for more information.

Thank you for being a loyal member of our community and for joining us on this journey. We’re really excited about Sensu Go and the benefits we see for you, our users. Don’t forget to join us in Slack or Discourse to let us know your thoughts — as always, user feedback continues to inform our product decisions — and in the meantime, happy monitoring!