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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Monitoring Tools
  5. Graphite vs Sensu

Graphite vs Sensu

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Graphite
Graphite
Stacks383
Followers419
Votes42
GitHub Stars6.0K
Forks1.3K
Sensu
Sensu
Stacks201
Followers251
Votes56
GitHub Stars2.9K
Forks386

Graphite vs Sensu: What are the differences?

Developers describe Graphite as "A highly scalable real-time graphing system". Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand. On the other hand, Sensu is detailed as "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.

Graphite and Sensu can be primarily classified as "Monitoring" tools.

Some of the features offered by Graphite are:

  • carbon - a Twisted daemon that listens for time-series data
  • whisper - a simple database library for storing time-series data (similar in design to RRD)
  • graphite webapp - A Django webapp that renders graphs on-demand using Cairo

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

  • Execute service checks
  • Send notifications
  • Collect metrics

"Render any graph" is the top reason why over 14 developers like Graphite, while over 11 developers mention "Support for almost anything" as the leading cause for choosing Sensu.

Graphite and Sensu are both open source tools. It seems that Graphite with 4.59K GitHub stars and 1.2K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Sensu with 2.96K GitHub stars and 389 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Graphite has a broader approval, being mentioned in 97 company stacks & 21 developers stacks; compared to Sensu, which is listed in 33 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

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Advice on Graphite, Sensu

Susmita
Susmita

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceonGrafanaGrafana

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

  • Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
  • Able to display automation test results,
  • System monitoring / Nginx API,
  • Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

869k views869k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Graphite
Graphite
Sensu
Sensu

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

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.

carbon - a Twisted daemon that listens for time-series data;whisper - a simple database library for storing time-series data (similar in design to RRD);graphite webapp - A Django webapp that renders graphs on-demand using Cairo
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
6.0K
GitHub Stars
2.9K
GitHub Forks
1.3K
GitHub Forks
386
Stacks
383
Stacks
201
Followers
419
Followers
251
Votes
42
Votes
56
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 16
    Render any graph
  • 9
    Great functions to apply on timeseries
  • 8
    Well supported integrations
  • 6
    Includes event tracking
  • 3
    Rolling aggregation makes storage managable
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
    Plugins
  • 1
    Written in Go
Integrations
Nagios
Nagios
Logstash
Logstash
Windows Server
Windows Server
Netdata
Netdata
Riemann
Riemann
Diamond
Diamond
Telegraf
Telegraf
collectd
collectd
Ganglia
Ganglia
ServiceNow.com
ServiceNow.com
Prometheus
Prometheus
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Grafana
Grafana
PagerDuty
PagerDuty

What are some alternatives to Graphite, Sensu?

Grafana

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

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

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

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

Netdata

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

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

Lumigo

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

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

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

Telegraf

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.

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