Nagios vs Sensu

Overview

Nagios

Stacks811

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

Sensu

Stacks201

Followers251

Votes56

GitHub Stars2.9K

Forks386

Nagios vs Sensu: What are the differences?

Introduction

Nagios and Sensu are both open-source monitoring tools used to monitor the infrastructure and applications of an organization. While they serve a similar purpose, there are key differences between the two.

Architecture: Nagios follows a centralized architecture, where a single server collects and processes monitoring data. In contrast, Sensu follows a distributed architecture, where multiple agents collect data and forward it to a central server. This distributed architecture allows for greater scalability and flexibility in deployment.
Scalability: Nagios has limitations in terms of scalability, especially when monitoring a large number of devices or services. It is known to be resource-intensive and may struggle to handle high loads. Sensu, on the other hand, is designed to be highly scalable, thanks to its distributed architecture. It can handle a larger number of devices and services without sacrificing performance.
Configuration Management: Nagios relies on declarative configuration files that need to be manually updated whenever changes are made. This can be cumbersome and time-consuming, especially in large environments. Sensu, however, leverages configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef, allowing for automated and dynamic configuration updates. This makes managing and maintaining monitoring configurations much easier.
Flexibility: Nagios provides a predefined set of monitoring plugins and functionalities, limiting its flexibility in customization. Sensu, on the other hand, offers more flexibility by allowing users to write their own plugins in various programming languages. This flexibility enables organizations to tailor their monitoring solutions to their specific needs.
Support for Modern Technologies: Nagios originated in the late 1990s and may not have native support for newer technologies like cloud infrastructure or containerization. Sensu, being a relatively newer tool, has better support for these modern technologies, including integrations with popular cloud providers and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
Monitoring Approach: Nagios primarily follows an active monitoring approach, where it actively checks the status of devices/services at defined intervals. Sensu, on the other hand, supports both active and passive monitoring approaches. In passive monitoring, monitored devices/services send data to Sensu whenever a specific event occurs, allowing for more reactive monitoring and alerting.

In summary, Nagios and Sensu differ in their architecture, scalability, configuration management, flexibility, support for modern technologies, and monitoring approaches. While Nagios is known for its centralized architecture and limited scalability, Sensu offers a distributed architecture, better scalability, automated configuration management, flexibility, support for modern technologies, and the ability to perform both active and passive monitoring.

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Advice on Nagios, Sensu

Matthias

Teamlead IT at NanoTemper Technologies

Jun 11, 2020

Decided

free open source
modern interface and architecture
large community
extendable I knew Nagios for decades but it was really outdated (by its architecture) at some point. That's why Icinga started first as a fork, not with Icinga2 it is completely built from scratch but backward-compatible with Nagios plugins. Now it has reached a state with which I am confident.

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Detailed Comparison

Nagios	Sensu
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	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.
Monitor your entire IT infrastructure;Spot problems before they occur;Know immediately when problems arise;Share availability data with stakeholders;Detect security breaches;Plan and budget for IT upgrades;Reduce downtime and business losses	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
Statistics
GitHub Stars 57	GitHub Stars 2.9K
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks 386
Stacks 811	Stacks 201
Followers 1.1K	Followers 251
Votes 102	Votes 56
Pros & Cons
Pros 53 It just works 28 The standard 12 Customizable 8 The Most flexible monitoring system 1 Huge stack of free checks/plugins to choose from	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
Integrations
No integrations available	ServiceNow.com Prometheus InfluxDB Grafana PagerDuty

What are some alternatives to Nagios, Sensu?

Grafana

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.

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.

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.

Related Comparisons

Nagios vs Sensu: What are the differences?

Introduction

Architecture: Nagios follows a centralized architecture, where a single server collects and processes monitoring data. In contrast, Sensu follows a distributed architecture, where multiple agents collect data and forward it to a central server. This distributed architecture allows for greater scalability and flexibility in deployment.
Scalability: Nagios has limitations in terms of scalability, especially when monitoring a large number of devices or services. It is known to be resource-intensive and may struggle to handle high loads. Sensu, on the other hand, is designed to be highly scalable, thanks to its distributed architecture. It can handle a larger number of devices and services without sacrificing performance.
Configuration Management: Nagios relies on declarative configuration files that need to be manually updated whenever changes are made. This can be cumbersome and time-consuming, especially in large environments. Sensu, however, leverages configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef, allowing for automated and dynamic configuration updates. This makes managing and maintaining monitoring configurations much easier.
Flexibility: Nagios provides a predefined set of monitoring plugins and functionalities, limiting its flexibility in customization. Sensu, on the other hand, offers more flexibility by allowing users to write their own plugins in various programming languages. This flexibility enables organizations to tailor their monitoring solutions to their specific needs.
Support for Modern Technologies: Nagios originated in the late 1990s and may not have native support for newer technologies like cloud infrastructure or containerization. Sensu, being a relatively newer tool, has better support for these modern technologies, including integrations with popular cloud providers and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
Monitoring Approach: Nagios primarily follows an active monitoring approach, where it actively checks the status of devices/services at defined intervals. Sensu, on the other hand, supports both active and passive monitoring approaches. In passive monitoring, monitored devices/services send data to Sensu whenever a specific event occurs, allowing for more reactive monitoring and alerting.

Nagios vs Sensu

Overview

Nagios vs Sensu: What are the differences?