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Sensu vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Sensu vs Zabbix

Sensu and Zabbix are both popular monitoring tools used in IT infrastructure. While they share the common goal of monitoring and gathering data from systems, there are key differences that set them apart. Here are the 6 key differences between Sensu and Zabbix:

  1. Scalability: Sensu is designed to be highly scalable and is well-suited for large-scale and complex environments. It uses a distributed architecture that allows for easy scaling and handling of a high volume of checks. On the other hand, Zabbix is also scalable but is better suited for medium-sized environments due to its centralized architecture.

  2. Flexibility: Sensu provides greater flexibility in terms of customizing and extending its functionality through plugins and custom handlers. It allows users to write checks in different programming languages, making it more adaptable to various use cases. Zabbix, on the other hand, is more rigid in terms of customization options and primarily relies on built-in monitoring templates.

  3. Ease of Use: Zabbix offers a user-friendly web interface, making it easy to navigate and set up monitoring quickly. It provides a wide range of predefined templates, graphs, and dashboards that simplify monitoring configuration. Sensu, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve and requires more expertise to set up and configure. It provides less out-of-the-box functionality and requires more manual configuration.

  4. Versatility: Sensu is known for its versatility and can monitor a wide range of systems, including cloud-based infrastructures, containers, and microservices. It can integrate with various technologies and tools to gather data from different sources. Zabbix, while capable of monitoring various systems, is more focused on traditional infrastructure and may require additional configurations for newer technologies.

  5. Alerting: Sensu excels in its flexible and robust alerting capabilities. It provides fine-grained control over alert routing and allows integration with popular notification systems like PagerDuty, Slack, and OpsGenie. Zabbix also offers alerting features but may not be as flexible or have the same level of integration options as Sensu.

  6. Maintenance and Support: Sensu is an open-source tool with a strong and active community that provides continuous support and regular updates. It also has a commercial offering that provides additional enterprise-level support. Zabbix, on the other hand, is primarily supported by its vendor, Zabbix SIA, with both community and enterprise editions available.

In summary, Sensu offers scalability, flexibility, and versatility, making it suitable for large and complex environments that require extensive customization and integration capabilities. Zabbix, on the other hand, provides ease of use, strong alerting features, and good support, making it a solid choice for medium-sized environments with more traditional infrastructure. Choose Sensu for advanced customization and complex environments, while Zabbix provides simplicity and solid functionality for more standard use cases.

Advice on Sensu and Zabbix
Needs advice
on
CentreonCentreon
and
ZabbixZabbix

My team is divided on using Centreon or Zabbix for enterprise monitoring and alert automation. Can someone let us know which one is better? There is one more tool called Datadog that we are using for cloud assets. Of course, Datadog presents us with huge bills. So we want to have a comparative study. Suggestions and advice are welcome. Thanks!

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Replies (4)
Geoffrey Timmerman
Systems Engineer at Simac · | 6 upvotes · 282.6K views
Recommends
on
ZabbixZabbix
at

I work at Volvo Car Corporation as a consultant Project Manager. We have deployed Zabbix in all of our factories for factory monitoring because after thorough investigation we saw that Zabbix supports the wide variety of Operating Systems, hardware peripherals and devices a Car Manufacturer has.

No other tool had the same amount of support onboard for our production environment and we didn't want to end up using a different tool again for several areas. That is the major strong point about Zabbix and it's free of course. Another strong point is the documentation which is widely available; Zabbix Youtube channel with tutorial video's, Zabbix share which holds free templates, the Zabbix online documentation and the Zabbix forum also helped us out quite a bit. Deployment is quite easy since it uses templates, so almost all configuration can be done on server side.

To conclude, we are really pleased with the tool so far, it helped us detect several causes of issues that were a pain to solve in the past.

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Recommends
on
CentreonCentreon

Centreon is part of the Nagios ecosystem, meaning there is a huge number of resources you may find around in the community (plugins, skills, addons). Zabbix monitoring paradigms are totally different from Centreon. Centreon plugins have some kind of intelligence when they are launched, where Zabbix monitoring rules are configured centrally with the raw data collected. Testing both will help you understand :) Users used to say Centreon may be faster for setup and deployment. And in the end, both are full of monitoring features. Centreon has out of the box a full catalog of probes from cloud to the edge https://www.centreon.com/en/plugins-pack-list/ As soon as you have defined your monitoring policies and template, you can deploy it fast through command line API or REST API. Centreon plays well in the ITSM, Automation, AIOps spaces with many connectors for Prometheus, ServiceNow, GLPI, Ansible, Chef, Splunk, ... The polling server mode is one of the differentiators with Centreon. You set up remote server(s) and chose btw multiple information-exchange mechanisms. Powerful and resilient for remote, VPN, DMZ, satellite networks. Centreon is a good value for price to do a data collection (availability, performance, fault) on a wide range of technologies (physical, legacy, cloud). There are pro support and enterprise version with dashboards and reporting. IT Central Station gathers many user feedback you can rely on both Centreon & Zabbix https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/centreon-reviews  

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muutech
at Muutech Monitoring Solutions, S.L. · | 3 upvotes · 280.3K views
Recommends
on
ZabbixZabbix

We highly recommend Zabbix. We have used it to build our own monitoring product (available on cloud -like datadog- or on premise with support) because of its flexibility and extendability. It can be easily integrated with the powerful dashboarding and data aggregation of Grafana, so it is perfect. All configuration is done via web and templates, so it scales well and can be distributed via proxies. I think there also more companies providing consultancy in Zabbix (like ours) than Centreon and community is much wider. Also Zabbix roadmap and focus (compatibility with Elasticsearch, Prometheus, TimescaleDB) is really really good.

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Recommends
on
KamonKamon
at

Hi Vivek, what's your stack? If huge monitoring bills are your concern and if you’re using a number of JVM languages, or mostly Scala / Akka, and would like “one tool to monitor them all”, Kamon might be the friendliest choice to go for.

Kamon APM’s major benefit is it comes with a built-in dashboard for the most important metrics to monitor, taking the pain of figuring out what to monitor and building your own dashboards for weeks out of the monitoring.

https://kamon.io/apm/

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Pros of Sensu
Pros of Zabbix
  • 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
  • 21
    Free
  • 9
    Alerts
  • 5
    Service/node/network discovery
  • 5
    Templates
  • 4
    Base metrics from the box
  • 3
    Multi-dashboards
  • 3
    SMS/Email/Messenger alerts
  • 2
    Grafana plugin available
  • 2
    Supports Graphs ans screens
  • 2
    Support proxies (for monitoring remote branches)
  • 1
    Perform website checking (response time, loading, ...)
  • 1
    API available for creating own apps
  • 1
    Templates free available (Zabbix Share)
  • 1
    Works with multiple databases
  • 1
    Advanced integrations
  • 1
    Supports multiple protocols/agents
  • 1
    Complete Logs Report
  • 1
    Open source
  • 1
    Supports large variety of Operating Systems
  • 1
    Supports JMX (Java, Tomcat, Jboss, ...)

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Cons of Sensu
Cons of Zabbix
  • 1
    Plugins
  • 1
    Written in Go
  • 5
    The UI is in PHP
  • 2
    Puppet module is sluggish

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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 Zabbix?

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

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Jun 26 2018 at 3:26AM

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What are some alternatives to Sensu and Zabbix?
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Nagios
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.
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Icinga
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Grafana
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