Power Admin PA Server Monitor vs. Sensu, by Sumo Logic

Power Admin PA Server Monitor works great for our needs. We do however wish that it worked for Linux Operating Systems.

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

• Alerts us when a server, storage device, or network device goes offline.
• Alerts us when a critical service running on a server stops running.
• Alerts us if files change, are removed, or are created.
• Alerts us if an unauthorized file type has been created on a monitored system
• Generate up-time reports for Executives.

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

• It does have bulk settings tools to set up bulk settings for multiple devices, but to me it could be a bit easier to use. However, I ran into a snag and reached out to support and they are great.
• It does not support Linux Operating Systems.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Excellent product, easy to use, many features, and fast/excellent support.

Incentivized

It is an excellent product that is much easier to use than many other open source type offerings. Easy learning curve.

Incentivized

Very fast, knowledgeable, and helpful support.

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

Overall it is an easy install and setup and their support is very fast and helpful

Incentivized

We tried some open source solutions. But, they were much more difficult to set up and maintain. PA is easy to use "out of the box". We looked at other paid solutions also, but they were cost prohibitive, since we are a small institution.

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

• It has decreased our critical services downtime, because we are able to VPN in and fix issues as soon as Power Admin alerts us of an issue. ROI has been excellent.
• It allows us to catch issues before they become critical by alerting us on errors that show up in our Event Logs.

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