The Q4'19-Q1'20 Sensu Go product roadmap

Looking back at one year of Sensu Go and looking ahead at version 6.0!

Sensu Go has come a long way since its GA release in December 2018; in a little over 10 months, we’ve seen 14 minor version releases (5.1–5.14), including dozens of new features and product enhancements, and hundreds of bug fixes (see the changelog for more information). Here’s a high-level timeline of what we’ve accomplished:

• December 2018: General Availability of Sensu Go OSS
• March 2019: GA of first licensed features & commercial support
• June 2019: support for enterprise datastore (Postgres)
• July 2019: Bonsai asset hosting & global CDN
• August 2019: multi-tenant dashboard & security enhancements
• September 2019: Sensu <=> Bonsai integration
• October 2019 (latest release): mTLS agent authentication
• November 2019 (coming soon): Multi-site federation
• December 2019 (coming soon): Secrets management & HashiCorp Vault integration

Next-generation Sensu

Sensu Go is not only a more scalable, integrated, and secure Sensu – it’s the most scalable, integrated, and secure monitoring platform, period.

Here are just a few of the benefits of choosing Sensu Go:

• Scalable. Monitor over 30K nodes and process over 100M events per hour from a single moderately configured Sensu Go cluster. Overcome challenges related to organizational scalability with namespaces (multi-tenancy) and role-based access controls. And starting next month, scaling Sensu will become even easier with multi-site federation (coming November 2019).
• Integrated. Eliminate data silos with Sensu’s unique monitoring event pipeline and class-leading extensibility. Easily connect Sensu to existing tools and systems with Sensu plugins, or write your own – in any programming language you choose. Keeping tabs on this deeply integrated workflow will become much easier with the Incident Hub (coming Q1’20).
• Secure. Manage user access with SSO (via LDAP, Active Directory, or OIDC) and automate agent authentication using mTLS with external PKI and CRL support. Using Sensu to improve visibility into the health of your most sensitive systems will become safer later this year with the introduction of first-class secrets management and HashiCorp Vault integration (coming December 2019).

Q4’19 – Q1’20 Roadmap

What’s on the horizon for Sensu Go? Multi-site federation (November 2019), secrets management (December 2019), auto-discovery (Q1’20), and a new “Incident Hub” dashboard (Q1’20).

• Multi-site federation. Scaling Sensu inside of most organizations is usually less about vertical scale (which we’ve achieved, as mentioned above), and more about horizontal scale. More often we see the need for multiple highly available Sensu clusters – per region, per availability zone, per business unit, per cloud provider, or per some other physical or logical boundary – and with that need comes a requirement for centralized access and control. Sensu Go multi-site federation will provide a centralized pane of glass and configuration replication for federated Sensu Go deployments.
• Secrets management. Although secrets fall squarely in the realm of a security enhancement, a more secure monitoring solution also removes barriers to massive scale. Launching in Q4’19, secrets management for Sensu Go will provide a secure interface between your monitoring configuration (e.g., monitors and integrations) and the secrets they require to function. Sensu backends will manage secrets, respecting secret leases/timeouts, and Sensu will automatically redact secrets from leaking to logs, dashboards, or any other output. The default secrets management provider will support reading secrets from environment variables, and a new HashiCorp Vault integration will provide enterprise users with a more robust solution.
• Auto-discovery. One of Sensu’s core functions has always been automated registration and de-registration of ephemeral nodes in and out of monitoring – but local auto-discovery was historically provided by traditional configuration management. With Sensu Go’s reduced reliance on external configuration management, we’re now preparing to improve Sensu’s automated discovery of the local runtime environment (Is the agent running in a Docker container? On Kubernetes? On LXC? On AWS/EC2? On GCP/GCE? On Azure/AVM?), as well as simple process-table discovery (Is the node running a database?). Auto-discovery will enable real-time modification of Sensu agent subscriptions, further simplifying agent configuration and paving the way for fully automated and turn-key monitoring solution.
• Incident Hub. Launching in Q1 2020, the Incident Hub will make it possible to keep tabs on actions Sensu has taken in response to a monitoring failure from a central location. For example, if Sensu attempts to remediate a problem via our Ansible Tower integration, you’ll see the result of the Ansible Tower Job; or if Sensu creates a PagerDuty incident in response to a monitoring failure, you’ll see that action in the Sensu dashboard – and when someone responds to that alert in PagerDuty, the Incident Hub will show that activity as well. End users can continue to use the third-party tools instead of Sensu, but operations teams will now have a centralized location to keep tabs on what happens after Sensu detects a failure. Over time, the Incident Hub will be extended to automate incident response, with automations like pulling in graphs from external telemetry systems and generating post-mortem reports when an incident is resolved.

NOTE: if you’re interested in any of these features and you’re not already talking to our sales team, reach out via our website: https://sensu.io/contact. Otherwise, check with your account manager and they’ll be happy to share additional information (including specs from our engineering team) about any of these upcoming features.

Sensu 6.0.0: coming soon to a server near you

This roadmap for Sensu Go is greater than the sum of its parts. It represents a major milestone (culminating in a “6.0.0” version number), in which the Sensu platform will become a feature-complete multi-cloud monitoring platform. But we won’t stop there! Much to the contrary: our attention will shift to added-value solutions we can deliver on top of this platform and advocacy programs to grow the Sensu contributor community. 2020 will be an exciting year, and we can’t wait to bring you even more features for scalable, integrated, and secure monitoring.