Sensu, by Sumo Logic vs. Zenoss

• 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

Overall I would say that we have been very happy with Zenoss. It has been a great server monitoring tool. There are certain aspects that we would like to expand into, such as Capacity Planning, Network Performance Monitoring, and log analysis. We have coupled Zenoss logs with Splunk for external log management, but would like to start using some of the built-in analysis tools.

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

Incentivized

• Monitoring Windows, Unix/Linux, Infra apps, storage, virtualization, converge infra etc..
• Integrate with other monitoring tools and receive events for aggregation and correlation
• Integration with ITSM( SNOW) for auto ticket creation

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Hard to troubleshot and fix the issue.
• More development for monitoring storage systems.
• Load balancing on Zenoss instance.

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

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

• 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

• Our ROI was excellent, but the company has also implemented other tools that compete with Zenoss.
• Zenoss has a long history of excellence in monitoring and alerting
• Overall observability is easier to manage due to our comfort with the tool set