Sensu is a compelling alternative to Nagios, especially for Cloud and Kubernetes monitoring, because it makes it easy to migrate your existing service checks. Sensu checks offer built-in support for monitoring “commands”, and 100% compatibility with Nagios-style plugins.
Sensu enables organizations to breathe new life into their existing monitoring instrumentation to unblock cloud adoption or other digital transformation initiatives.
Sensu solves challenges inherent to the elastic nature of cloud computing by automatically registering and deregistering new endpoints, including compute instances and containers. Sensu makes it easy to monitor dynamic infrastructure while preventing false positive alerts resulting from workloads reaching the end of their lifecycle and being decommissioned (i.e. normal cloud provisioning events). Sensu decouples “hosts” from monitoring configuration, eliminating the need to manage Nagios host and hostgroup configuration objects – a task that many have found to be challenging if not impossible in today’s world of ephemeral cloud computing. Sensu is kubernetes native, using the sidecar pattern for monitoring kubernetes pods and services.
Nagios’ host-based approach to monitoring configuration and tightly-coupled configuration objects worked well with the primarily static infrastructures of the late 90’s and early 2000’s, but this same methodology has proven extremely fragile in the cloud era. Sensu eliminates risks related to Nagios configuration management by adopting a declarative configuration model and configuration API. Sensu empowers DevOps and SRE team to automate monitoring configuration changes and treat monitoring as code. Sensu works with CICD pipelines and supports devOps workflows natively.
Sensu is a compelling Nagios alternative because it makes it easy to migrate your existing Nagios service checks. Sensu checks offer built-in support for Nagios monitoring “commands”, and 100% compatibility with Nagios plugins. Sensu enables organizations to breathe new life into their existing Nagios monitoring instrumentation to unblock cloud adoption or other digital transformation initiatives.
In the era of public cloud and cloud native computing, our old friend the service check is being displaced by the “monitoring job”. Modern cloud native frameworks (such as Kubernetes and Prometheus), make use of a “Job” as a central concept for scheduling & running tasks. This is exactly what Sensu checks are! Sensu checks are “monitoring jobs” which are effectively the next generation of the service check, designed for public cloud and cloud native!
Need FedRamp compliance while continuing to use your existing Nagios plugins? Sensu FIPS builds for Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) compliance are available and being used in federal cloud environments.
“Sensu makes me feel like I can sleep well at night”
— Cameron Soleimani, Systems Engineer @ Uber
Transitioning Nagios-based monitoring to public cloud and container platforms
Eliminating challenges related to Nagios object configuration automation
How to migrate a Nagios-based monitoring solution and adopt modern observability best practices
Made with #monitoringlove by SensuTM in Canada 🇨🇦 and the USA 🇺🇸. © 2017-2021 – Privacy Statement – Terms & Conditions