Sensu, by Sumo Logic vs. Zabbix

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Sensu
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Sensu, now from Sumo Logic (acquired in June of 2021) is presented as a future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline is used by businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain visibility into their multi-cloud environments. The vendor boasts companies like Sony, Box.com, and Activision use Sensu to help deliver value to their customers. Sensu offers a comprehensive monitoring solution for enterprises, providing visibility across every…N/A
Zabbix
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Zabbix is an open-source network performance monitoring software. It includes prebuilt official and community-developed templates for integrating with networks, applications, and endpoints, and can automate some monitoring processes.N/A
Pricing
Sensu, by Sumo LogicZabbix
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SensuZabbix
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
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Sensu, by Sumo LogicZabbix
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User Ratings
Sensu, by Sumo LogicZabbix
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(2 ratings)
9.0
(25 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
3.0
(1 ratings)
5.0
(5 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Sensu, by Sumo LogicZabbix
Likelihood to Recommend
Sumo Logic
  • 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.
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Zabbix
Zabbix is very well suited for infrastructure monitoring i.e. the underlying host servers, basically, compute nodes. However, it has limited FM & PM capabilities for the workloads, i.e., the virtual machines (VMs). Zabbix has an easy-to-use GUI which can be explored easily & provides good filtering of the data.
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Pros
Sumo Logic
  • Unique concept as a "monitoring router" that can tie services together.
  • Backward-compatible with Nagios environments.
  • More of a DevOps focus than Nagios.
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Zabbix
  • Collecting hardware data - CPU, Memory, Network, and Disk Metrics are collected and reported on.
  • Flexible design - It is very easy to build out even very large environments via the templating system. You can also start where you are - network monitoring, server monitoring, etc. and then build it out from there as time and resources permit.
  • Provides a "plugin architecture" (via XML templates) to allow end users to extend it to monitor all kinds of equipment, software, or other metrics that are not already added into the software already.
  • Very complete documentation. Almost every aspect of Zabbix has been documented and reported on.
  • Cost - Zabbix is FOSS software and always free. Support is reasonably priced and readily available.
Read full review
Cons
Sumo Logic
  • Cannot be solely used for tracking metrics over time.
  • Not a very good UI.
Read full review
Zabbix
  • In a busy Zabbix environment, it can easily overwhelm the underlying database. Plan on having SSDs and a significant server infrastructure to keep up with more than a hundred hosts.
  • Building out Zabbix metrics that suit your environment can be very time consuming. When choosing a monitoring platform like Zabbix, expect a steep learning curve and to invest significant resources to make the tool valuable.
  • This is less important than it has been in the past, but current versions of Zabbix still do not handle IPMI checks of hardware very well. We needed to write our own wrapper for IPMI checks rather than using the built in IPMI poller.
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Likelihood to Renew
Sumo Logic
No answers on this topic
Zabbix
It is free. It didn't cost anything to implement (other than my time and the cost incurred for it) and it is filling a badly needed gap in our IT infrastructure. Support is available if we have issues and can be done annually or paid for on a per incident basis as needed. Expansion, updates, and all other future lifecycle activities are likewise free of cost, so as long as someone is able to implement/maintain the software (and the OSS project is maintained) then I imagine the company will never leave it.
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Usability
Sumo Logic
No answers on this topic
Zabbix
If you go deeper than the dashboards, the user friendliness goes away quickly
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Support Rating
Sumo Logic
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.
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Zabbix
The setup is the most time-consuming portion of using zabbix. It takes a lot of effort to shape it into a usable format and even then it can get very messy. It's not exactly intuitive and as mentioned the UI seems a bit antiquated. If I was to roll out a monitoring solution from scratch, I'd probably look for alternatives which are easier to use and maintain.
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Implementation Rating
Sumo Logic
No answers on this topic
Zabbix
We are a mainly Windows environment, so it would be useful if we could have used Active Directory to deploy agents. As of version 4.2, Zabbix has announced a new agent MSI file to allow exactly that. Unfortunately, we didn't have that option. Also, for Linux and MAC deployments, there is no simple way to deploy that. Using remote scripts you may be able to create something, but most places will opt for either SNMP (agentless) or manual installation of agents to add to Zabbix. A way of deploying agents via discovery would go a long way to helping in the adoption of the tool.
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Alternatives Considered
Sumo Logic
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.
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Zabbix
We're using the Solarwinds suite as our global monitoring standard, but it is very complex and its licensing model makes it difficult to monitor a wide range of technologies. So, we're using Zabbix as a complement on our monitoring process. Zabbix is a way more flexible and has free integrations to a wide range of technologies. It is also more 'user friendly' and easy to manage.
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Return on Investment
Sumo Logic
  • 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.
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Zabbix
  • Zabbix simply makes it easier to identify, and subsequently resolve problems quickly
  • Zabbix gives one web page to look at to see a list of all on-going issue in a single place
  • Zabbix can automate response to alerts. For example, Zabbix allows you the customization to take a monitored server out of production rotation if it is identified as unhealthy
Read full review
ScreenShots

Sensu Screenshots

Screenshot of Sensu dashboard homepageScreenshot of Sensu dashboard namespace switcherScreenshot of Sensu events displayed in Grafana. In the examples above, Sensu is comfortably handling 40,000 Sensu agent connections (and their keepalives) and processing over 36,000 events per second.Screenshot of Sensu events displayed in Grafana. In the examples above, Sensu is comfortably handling 40,000 Sensu agent connections (and their keepalives) and processing over 36,000 events per second.