Five Years of Sensu

Although Sensu wouldn’t become a publicly available open-source project until November 2011, the Sensu journey officially began five years ago this week. Five years ago I committed an empty README.md file (commit #1) to an otherwise empty repository called “Sensu” where I would then describe my #monitoringlove goals (commit #2), and the rest is history. We started this humble project at Sonian to replace an aging Nagios installation that couldn’t keep up with the rapidly evolving demands of a dynamic public-cloud infrastructure. Sonian was not (and is not) the only company facing that challenge, which has resulted in Sensu’s continued growth, and establishment as one of the most trusted monitoring platforms in the world today.

Five years by the numbers

Digging through the commit data we could extract from the relevant GitHub.com APIs, a few numbers stand out. In the 1826 days since committing an empty README.md file to an empty repo there have been:

• over 20000 commits
• contributions from over 300 developers (from dozens of countries in five continents around the world)
• over 1500 issues closed
• $0 in venture (or any other) capital funding raised
• a whole lot of #monitoringlove shared

Although only roughly 20–30% of these commits contain geotagged location data, it is exciting to see that subset of contributions visualized on an interactive map as evidence that Sensu has truly spread the #monitoringlove to a global community!

NOTE: the map plots commits made to the open-source Sensu Core code base and Sensu Plugins projects only. It does not include commits made to the various community dashboard projects, or the roughly 70–80% of commits that don’t include geotagged locations. See here for an alternate version of this map with commit counts. In other news, we’re still waiting on our first commits from Africa and Antarctica to have contributions from all seven continents!

15-months of Sensu Enterprise, and Sensu Core version 1.0

As told in a recent blog post, efforts to improve the open-source Sensu project didn’t really ramp up until I left Sonian in February 2013 to join Heavy Water and focus on solving monitoring problems on a more regular basis. Two years later, these efforts eventually resulted in Sensu’s shift to an open-core model and the launch of Sensu Enterprise (in April 2015).

Although Sensu Enterprise is only 15-months old, it is already fulfilling its purpose as a source of revenue to support future Sensu development. Perhaps more importantly, it has also given our team more opportunities than ever before to learn about how different organizations are using Sensu, and how to support them. This data has not only helped us continue to improve the Sensu Core and Sensu Enterprise software and documentation — it is also enabling us to extend new added-value services to Sensu Core users (more on this below).

You may be wondering — “how is Sensu five years old, and yet it still hasn’t reached version ‘1.0’”?!

We’ve been getting a lot of questions recently about why the Sensu Core project has avoided a “version 1.0” release for so long. It’s definitely not a result of being unfit for production, as Sensu has been battle tested for several years in production environments numbering into the tens of thousands of servers (e.g. at Yelp with Docker containers, at Simple on AWS, and at General Electric on CloudFoundry are just a few of many, many examples). Rather, I’ve always felt that a “1.0” version number should be reserved for when Sensu’s building blocks — the primitives used to solve monitoring problems — would mature to the point where future changes will be minimal, and long-term backwards compatibility can be ensured. I’m very happy to be able to announce at this time that the impending version 0.26 release of Sensu Core is intended to provide a basis for a “version 1.0” release candidate, and that we are planning to release Sensu Core version 1.0 before the end of Summer. Stay tuned for more information.

Let’s celebrate together

To celebrate this milestone we are very happy to announce a new service offering for Sensu Core users, and a special promotion for new Sensu Enterprise customers.

Enterprise Support for Sensu Core

Enterprise Support for Sensu Core provides organizations who are composing monitoring solutions with Sensu Core to take advantage of the same Enterprise Support SLA and FREE annual training that are offered to our Sensu Enterprise users, without paying for added-value features which may not be needed within their organizations at this time.

Enterprise Support for Sensu Core will be available in five (5) pricing tiers, with the same monthly and annual subscriptions as Sensu Enterprise (i.e. get two months FREE when paying annually):

Enterprise Support for Sensu Core is available for purchase today by contacting our sales team, and will become available to purchase through the Sensu website later this month.

FREE Professional Services for new Sensu Enterprise Customers

Are monitoring improvements on your organizations roadmap? Has your business outgrown your existing monitoring tools? Is your existing monitoring solution having trouble keeping up with improvements to how applications and infrastructure are provisioned or otherwise automated within your organization? Sensu can help!

Purchase a Sensu Enterprise annual license by July 29th and get up to 200-hours of professional services for FREE (minimum 1000-server license). Please contact our sales team today to learn more about this limited-time opportunity.

Thank you

In closing, I want to personally thank everyone who has contributed to Sensu’s growth over the years — your questions in IRC channels and mailing lists, your GitHub issues and pull requests, and your dollars spent on Sensu Enterprise (and now Enterprise Support for Sensu Core) are all greatly appreciated.