Sensu — A powerful and scalable monitoring solution
Newfound Love
When the Twitter hashtag #monitoringsucks gained popularity a few years ago, it seemed as though monitoring software had reached its limits and stagnated. Will Sensu launch a new golden age?
A few years ago, it seemed like not much could change with free monitoring systems. Despite its many weaknesses, Nagios had asserted itself as the untiring top dog, and the alternative solutions barely provided any new approaches. On the other hand, infrastructure growth accelerated by the cloud pushed the majority of monitoring systems to their performance limits even more quickly. The prospect of more fun with server monitoring seemed limited.
Then a light appeared rather unexpectedly at the end of the tunnel. It was 2012, and a Swedish system administrator called Ulf Mansson was so impressed by a new monitoring software that he circulated the hashtag #monitoringlove. At the DevOps Days in Rome, he related in detail how switching to this new software had put the fun back in his Ops team's work. Enthusiasm spread through the audience, and as my continuously growing hosting infrastructure was overtaxing Nagios (and my nerves) at the time, I was more than curious about what kind of system it was. The name of the project? Sensu [1].
About Sensu
Sensu enjoys the #monitoringlove of many Ops teams around the world. The Sensu program itself is written in Ruby, and its configuration files use the established JSON format. Sensu's architecture is very scalable, meaning you can monitor hundreds or even thousands of servers.
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