Overview

Sensu

Stacks204

Followers251

Votes56

GitHub Stars2.9K

Forks386

Grafana

Stacks18.4K

Followers14.6K

Votes415

GitHub Stars70.7K

Forks13.1K

Grafana vs Sensu: What are the differences?

Introduction

Grafana and Sensu are both popular tools used in monitoring and visualizing data in a website. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between them that set them apart.

Data Visualization: Grafana is primarily focused on data visualization and creating interactive dashboards for better data representation. It offers a wide range of visualization options and allows users to customize and interact with the displayed data easily.
Monitoring and Alerting: Sensu, on the other hand, is designed specifically for monitoring and alerting. It provides extensive capabilities for collecting data from various sources, processing them, and triggering alerts based on predefined rules and thresholds.
Architecture: Grafana follows a client-server architecture, where the Grafana server acts as the backend and the user interacts with it through a web browser. Sensu, on the other hand, follows a distributed architecture with multiple components such as Sensu Server, Sensu Agent, and Sensu API, which work together to collect and process data.
Plugins and Integrations: Grafana has a vast ecosystem of plugins and integrations, allowing users to extend its functionality and integrate it with various data sources and third-party tools. Sensu also provides plugins and integrations, but its focus is more on monitoring and alerting specific technologies and systems.
Graphical Query Editor: Grafana provides a graphical query editor, which allows users to easily compose queries and explore data sources visually. This makes it easier for non-technical users to work with data and create visualizations. Sensu, on the other hand, relies more on configuration files for defining the monitoring and alerting rules.
Community and Support: Grafana has a large and active community, with regular updates and a wealth of online resources and documentation available. Sensu also has a dedicated community and offers support options, but it may not have the same level of community engagement as Grafana.

In summary, while Grafana excels in data visualization and customization, Sensu focuses more on monitoring and alerting, with a distributed architecture and a distinctive approach to configuration.

Advice on Sensu, Grafana

Matt

Senior Software Engineering Manager at PayIt

May 3, 2021

Decidedon

Grafana

Prometheus

Kubernetes

Grafana and Prometheus together, running on Kubernetes , is a powerful combination. These tools are cloud-native and offer a large community and easy integrations. At PayIt we're using exporting Java application metrics using a Dropwizard metrics exporter, and our Node.js services now use the prom-client npm library to serve metrics.

1.1M views1.1M

Comments

Leonardo Henrique da

Pleno QA Enginneer at SolarMarket

Dec 8, 2020

Decided

The objective of this work was to develop a system to monitor the materials of a production line using IoT technology. Currently, the process of monitoring and replacing parts depends on manual services. For this, load cells, microcontroller, Broker MQTT, Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana were used. It was implemented in a workflow that had the function of collecting sensor data, storing it in a database, and visualizing it in the form of weight and quantity. With these developed solutions, he hopes to contribute to the logistics area, in the replacement and control of materials.

402k views402k

Comments

StackShare

Jun 25, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: “We need better analytics & insights into our Elasticsearch cluster. Grafana, which ships with advanced support for Elasticsearch, looks great but isn’t officially supported/endorsed by Elastic. Kibana, on the other hand, is made and supported by Elastic. I’m wondering what people suggest in this situation."

663k views663k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Sensu	Grafana
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.	Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.
Health checks & custom metrics; alerts & incident management; real-time inventory; auto-remediation & custom workflows; container monitoring; Kubernetes monitoring; telemetry & service health checking; multi-cloud monitoring	Create, edit, save & search dashboards;Change column spans and row heights;Drag and drop panels to rearrange;Use InfluxDB or Elasticsearch as dashboard storage;Import & export dashboard (json file);Import dashboard from Graphite;Templating
Statistics
GitHub Stars 2.9K	GitHub Stars 70.7K
GitHub Forks 386	GitHub Forks 13.1K
Stacks 204	Stacks 18.4K
Followers 251	Followers 14.6K
Votes 56	Votes 415
Pros & Cons
Pros 13 Support for almost anything 11 Easy setup 9 Message routing 7 Devs can code their own checks 5 Ease of use Cons 1 Written in Go 1 Plugins	Pros 89 Beautiful 68 Graphs are interactive 57 Free 56 Easy 34 Nicer than the Graphite web interface Cons 1 No interactive query builder
Integrations
ServiceNow.com Prometheus InfluxDB PagerDuty	Graphite InfluxDB

What are some alternatives to Sensu, Grafana?

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

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.

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Graphite

Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

StatsD

It is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

Jaeger

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

Telegraf

It is an agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics. Design goals are to have a minimal memory footprint with a plugin system so that developers in the community can easily add support for collecting metrics.