Nagios XI vs. Sensu, by Sumo Logic

Nagios is best suited in an large organization where it is production 24/7, but in SME (small/medium enterprise) you have to pay a lot to the administrator. Instead use some graphical and easy to use tool like IDERA.

Incentivized

• Well suited for raising pagers when you have count-based metrics.
• Well suited for threshold-based metrics.
• Not well suited for tracking events over the day, since graphs and other visualizations are missing.

Incentivized

• 3rd party integrations via open API.
• Extremely flexible and configurable long term storage of the very detailed performance information (years of per 1-5 min perf data numbers).
• Small Nagios XI footprint (very efficient MySQL DB and flat files for perf data), making it powerful tool for thousands of checks and hundreds of reports.
• Responsive support, willing to provide resolution outside the box and by various means possible.

Incentivized

• Unique concept as a "monitoring router" that can tie services together.
• Backward-compatible with Nagios environments.
• More of a DevOps focus than Nagios.

Incentivized

• The mobile interface is newly developed and needs more development. It should provide more options for the audit log and add more detail for the configuration rollback options.
• The scheduled report should be included in standard edition.
• Master Node is configurable on LINUX platform only. We had to hire a Linux administrator

Incentivized

• Cannot be solely used for tracking metrics over time.
• Not a very good UI.

Incentivized

Only because I never give out 10s. Nagios support goes above and beyond in helping with issues, workarounds, specific cases and requirements. Tracks customer implementation and history of the most important issues. Can’t complain (except that the team is small and quite probably overworked). Time to resolution could be much improved if only there were more folks to help around.

Incentivized

Sensu's customer support was always willing to work with us but never really seemed to learn much from our experiences. I think they get a lot of customers with DevOps IT teams that are willing to put in a lot of elbow grease to get the most of Sensu's architecture. However, despite explaining my continued disappointment with their documentation and the overall flow of the product, I never got much more than a "sorry" and a notice that their documentation was open source if I wanted to contribute to it. The problem, of course, is that you can't document what you don't understand. I'm a former technical writer, so I know that better than most.

Incentivized

Cost efficiency is the main reason which we opted [for] Nagios as we were previously using IDERA tool with comprehensive database monitoring solutions, but the slow performance we are getting while monitoring the instance of the database.

Incentivized

Have used New Relic and Sematext Cloud for APM and for tracking over days and visualizing the issues. But those are very expensive as compared to Sensu.

Incentivized

• Reduction of at least 10% of false alarms.
• Increased network traffic by 5%.

Incentivized

• Standing up the Sensu Go server took very little effort.
• Setting up and maintaining the build processes and deployment logic for Sensu assets and checks was somewhat exhausting and resulted in lower adoption among non-DevOps IT.
• The limited web interface resulted in lower adoption among non-DevOps IT.

Incentivized