Sensu vs Zabbix

Overview

Sensu

Stacks201

Followers251

Votes56

GitHub Stars2.9K

Forks386

Zabbix

Stacks684

Followers981

Votes66

GitHub Stars5.3K

Forks1.1K

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Sensu, Zabbix

vivek

Jun 8, 2020

Needs adviceon

Centreon

Zabbix

Datadog

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!

795k views795k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Sensu	Zabbix
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.	Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.
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	Smart, Highly Automated Metric Collection; Advanced Problem Detection; Intelligent Alerting and Remediation
Statistics
GitHub Stars 2.9K	GitHub Stars 5.3K
GitHub Forks 386	GitHub Forks 1.1K
Stacks 201	Stacks 684
Followers 251	Followers 981
Votes 56	Votes 66
Pros & Cons
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	Pros 21 Free 9 Alerts 5 Templates 5 Service/node/network discovery 4 Base metrics from the box Cons 5 The UI is in PHP 2 Puppet module is sluggish
Integrations
ServiceNow.com Prometheus InfluxDB Grafana PagerDuty	Slack Jira PagerDuty Grafana Ansible Skype Chef Bugzilla HipChat ServiceNow.com

What are some alternatives to Sensu, Zabbix?

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

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.

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, 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

Sensu vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Sensu vs Zabbix

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Sensu vs Zabbix

Overview

Sensu vs Zabbix: What are the differences?