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Sensu

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StatsD

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Sensu vs StatsD: What are the differences?

What is Sensu? Open source monitoring framework. A monitoring framework that aims to be simple, malleable, and scalable. Essentially, Sensu takes the results of “check” scripts run across many systems, and if certain conditions are met; passes their information to one or more “handlers”. Checks are used, for example, to determine if a service like Apache is up or down.

What is StatsD? Simple daemon for easy stats aggregation. StatsD is a front-end proxy for the Graphite/Carbon metrics server, originally written by Etsy's Erik Kastner. StatsD is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

Sensu and StatsD belong to "Monitoring Tools" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Sensu are:

  • Execute service checks
  • Send notifications
  • Collect metrics

On the other hand, StatsD provides the following key features:

  • buckets: Each stat is in its own "bucket". They are not predefined anywhere. Buckets can be named anything that will translate to Graphite (periods make folders, etc)
  • values: Each stat will have a value. How it is interpreted depends on modifiers. In general values should be integer.
  • flush: After the flush interval timeout (defined by config.flushInterval, default 10 seconds), stats are aggregated and sent to an upstream backend service.

"Support for almost anything" is the top reason why over 11 developers like Sensu, while over 6 developers mention "Single responsibility" as the leading cause for choosing StatsD.

Sensu and StatsD are both open source tools. It seems that StatsD with 14.2K GitHub stars and 1.83K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Sensu with 2.96K GitHub stars and 389 GitHub forks.

Lyft, Kickstarter, and Sauce Labs are some of the popular companies that use StatsD, whereas Sensu is used by Twilio SendGrid, Airbrake, and SimpleCrypto. StatsD has a broader approval, being mentioned in 72 company stacks & 16 developers stacks; compared to Sensu, which is listed in 33 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

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Pros of Sensu
Pros of StatsD
  • 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
  • 9
    Open source
  • 7
    Single responsibility
  • 5
    Efficient wire format
  • 3
    Handles aggregation
  • 3
    Loads of integrations
  • 1
    Many implementations
  • 1
    Scales well
  • 1
    Simple to use
  • 1
    NodeJS

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Cons of Sensu
Cons of StatsD
  • 1
    Plugins
  • 1
    Written in Go
  • 1
    No authentication; cannot be used over Internet

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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.

What is 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).

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Jobs that mention Sensu and StatsD as a desired skillset
Postman
San Francisco, United States
What companies use Sensu?
What companies use StatsD?
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Blog Posts

Jun 26 2018 at 3:26AM

Twilio SendGrid

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What are some alternatives to Sensu and StatsD?
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.
Zabbix
Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.
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!
Icinga
It monitors availability and performance, gives you simple access to relevant data and raises alerts to keep you in the loop. It was originally created as a fork of the Nagios system monitoring application.
See all alternatives