SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability vs. Sensu, by Sumo Logic

- For small teams serving big organizations - it's a really simple tool to install and set up relatively quickly. - the new installer is also great - I don't have to understand what modules need to be installed; it's all streamlined. - The HCO Licensing allows you to run the Additional polling engines at a scale where the previous licensing model didn't. We can deploy APEs in locations now, which would not have been worth the investment in previously as there weren't enough devices in that location/region to spend the $$$$ on an APE License.

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

• Automated dependency mapping is a big hit.
• High availability is extremely simple to implement.
• Simple to use and drill into issues.
• Analysis of growth patterns driving the recommendation engine.

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

• Can be complex to setup
• Is strongest with network resources
• Assumes a fairly large amount of base knowledge

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

- decent ease of use - good training materials - good documentation - acceptable level of expected knowledge

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

Solarwinds has the best overlap of the two others I've mentioned - the other two tools (Datadog and Dynatrace) are great in their own way but Solarwinds is just good at everything; if I had to pick one tool of the above, it would be Solarwinds for the compatibility and ease of use, the other tools are more focused on being great at certain things while Solarwinds is the jack of all trades.

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

• one license requiring 1 PO to be raised
• sharing costs between departments for monitoring under one platform using APEs

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