Amazon CloudWatch vs Sensu

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Amazon CloudWatch

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Sensu

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Amazon CloudWatch vs Sensu: What are the differences?

Comparing Amazon CloudWatch and Sensu

Amazon CloudWatch and Sensu are both monitoring and observability tools that are widely used in the IT industry. While they share some similarities, there are key differences between the two platforms.

  1. Integration with AWS Services: Amazon CloudWatch is tightly integrated with various AWS services, allowing users to easily collect and monitor metrics, logs, and events across their AWS resources. On the other hand, Sensu is a more agnostic monitoring tool that provides monitoring capabilities for both cloud-based and on-premises resources and can integrate with multiple cloud providers, not just AWS.

  2. Scalability and Flexibility: Amazon CloudWatch is designed to handle massive scale and can process and store vast amounts of data. It is highly scalable and can handle the monitoring needs of even the largest enterprises. Sensu also provides scalability but may require additional configuration and setup to handle larger workloads.

  3. Monitoring Capabilities: Amazon CloudWatch primarily focuses on monitoring AWS resources, such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, and S3 buckets. It provides built-in metrics for these resources, as well as the ability to create custom metrics. On the other hand, Sensu offers a broader range of monitoring capabilities and can monitor various resources, regardless of the cloud provider or technology stack.

  4. Alerting and Notifications: Amazon CloudWatch provides a robust alerting mechanism that supports various notification types, including email, SMS, and integration with other AWS services like SNS. Sensu also offers powerful alerting and notification features but provides more flexibility in terms of the notification methods and integrations with other services.

  5. Ease of Use and Configuration: Amazon CloudWatch offers a user-friendly interface and seamless integration with other AWS tools, making it relatively easy to set up and configure. Sensu, on the other hand, requires more manual configuration and may require additional expertise to properly set up and customize.

  6. Pricing Structure: Amazon CloudWatch has a pricing structure that is based on the volume of logs, metrics, and events ingested and stored, as well as the number of alarms and dashboards created. Sensu, on the other hand, follows a different pricing model and may have different cost structures depending on the deployment method (cloud-based or on-premises).

In summary, Amazon CloudWatch offers deep integration with AWS services, scalability, and a focused monitoring approach for AWS resources. Sensu, on the other hand, provides a more agnostic and flexible monitoring platform with broader capabilities and notification options. The choice between the two depends on specific requirements, cloud provider preferences, and monitoring needs.

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Pros of Amazon CloudWatch
Pros of Sensu
  • 76
    Monitor aws resources
  • 46
    Zero setup
  • 30
    Detailed Monitoring
  • 23
    Backed by Amazon
  • 19
    Auto Scaling groups
  • 11
    SNS and autoscaling integrations
  • 5
    Burstable instances metrics (t2 cpu credit balance)
  • 3
    HIPAA/PCI/SOC Compliance-friendly
  • 1
    Native tool for AWS so understand AWS out of the box
  • 13
    Support for almost anything
  • 11
    Easy setup
  • 9
    Message routing
  • 7
    Devs can code their own checks
  • 5
    Ease of use
  • 4
    Price
  • 3
    Nagios plugin compatibility
  • 3
    Easy configuration, scales well and performance is good
  • 1
    Written in Go

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Cons of Amazon CloudWatch
Cons of Sensu
  • 1
    Poor Search Capabilities
  • 1
    Plugins
  • 1
    Written in Go

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What is Amazon CloudWatch?

It helps you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. It retrieve your monitoring data, view graphs to help take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment.

What is Sensu?

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

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What companies use Amazon CloudWatch?
What companies use Sensu?
See which teams inside your own company are using Amazon CloudWatch or Sensu.
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Datadog
Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
Splunk
It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
New Relic
The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.
Prometheus
Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.
AWS CloudTrail
With CloudTrail, you can get a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services (such as AWS CloudFormation). The AWS API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service.
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