An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
Occasionally you run across a startup that already seems like an all-star band with a large fanbase and a back catalog of hits to play, and Sensu looks like one of those for cloud-native monitoring.
Now a funded commercial venture, co-founder Sean Porter started Sensu as an open-source multi-cloud monitoring project a few years ago with a unique ‘event-based pipeline’ approach.
Sensu grew in popularity among developers because of its lightweight footprint and downstream library reuse with other popular metrics providers such as Nagios, StatsD and now Prometheus; and upstream integrations with consuming incident management or communication platforms such as ServiceNow, Slack or PagerDuty.
Rather than take a request/response or REST-style approach, Sensu filters its own events and other incoming monitoring feeds and alerts into an event-based monitoring pipeline. This publish/subscribe approach allows their system to scale to monitor the tens of thousands of ephemeral container nodes and microservice workloads we see popping up behind modern enterprise applications, without creating the security risk of open ports.
From there, event handlers spring into action, allowing filters or plugins to be applied to ‘mutate’ or transform the event stream and deliver metrics and alerts to appropriate destinations.
© 2019 Intellyx. At the time of writing, Sensu is not an Intellyx customer. ServiceNow is a current Intellyx client. None of the other companies mentioned are Intellyx clients. Want to see more BrainCandy? Subscribe today. If you are a vendor seeking coverage from Intellyx, please contact us at PR@intellyx.com.
