Sensu vs StatsD

Overview

StatsD

Stacks373

Followers293

Votes31

Sensu

Stacks201

Followers251

Votes56

GitHub Stars2.9K

Forks386

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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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

StatsD	Sensu
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).	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.
Network daemon; Runs on the Node.js platform; Sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services	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 -	GitHub Stars 2.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 386
Stacks 373	Stacks 201
Followers 293	Followers 251
Votes 31	Votes 56
Pros & Cons
Pros 9 Open source 7 Single responsibility 5 Efficient wire format 3 Handles aggregation 3 Loads of integrations Cons 1 No authentication; cannot be used over Internet	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
Node.js Docker Graphite	ServiceNow.com Prometheus InfluxDB Grafana PagerDuty

What are some alternatives to StatsD, 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.

Nagios

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

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.

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

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 vs StatsD