Psychz - Nikhil
Votes: 0Posted On: Nov 08, 2017 05:41:36
Both the tools Nagios and Sensu are well known and have made their mark in the industry. However, Nagios still leads the market in terms of user base.
Nagios has been there in the market for very long now and it should have improved in many ways with the changing course of time. However, users are now running away from one of the most trusted monitoring tool of all time. On the other hand, Sensu is picking up in the market due to it's easy to use interface and simplicity.
In the following article, we are going to share and discuss plain simple facts and experiences of users across the globe. The basis on which you can make a choice and pick the right tool for yourself.
Following are some of the reason that will give you an idea which tool to choose between Nagios and Sensu
Nagios is massively overcomplicated, difficult to make it do anything new: if you find something it doesn't do, you know you're in for a week of research and reading of the documentation. The learning curve is very high with Nagios.
However, Sensu is definitely the new kid.
1. Easy Setup.
2. Nagios Plugins can be used with the Sensu Ecosystem.
3. Scalable and easily for the Cloud environment.
Nagios doesn't scale. Despite being written in C language and reasonably fast, a lot of Nagios works in series especially checks. With thousands of hosts and tens of thousands of checks, Nagios simply can't cope.
Additionally, the service requires a restart to recognize added, changed or removed configuration. In a virtualized or cloud world that could mean Nagios is being restarted tens or hundreds of times in a day.
Whenever you have to scale up or down your infrastructure, Sensu comes along. Nothing has to be reconfigured or restarted since new instances will be discovered automatically.
Nagios requires all the configuration for 1)checks 2)handlers but most importantly 3)hosts to be written in configuration files on the Nagios server. This means that each time one of the 3 above is changed (for example new hosts added, old hosts removed) you need to re-write the configuration files and restart Nagios.
Sensu is almost the same as the above, with one important difference -- when hosts are added or removed from your architecture (as is the case in most auto-scaling cloud deployments) -- the hosts themselves run a sensu-client that "subscribes" to different available checks. So when a new server comes into existence and says "I'm a webserver", the sensu-client running on it will ask the sensu-server "what checks should a webserver run on itself?" and run those.
Conclusion
Though Nagios has been around for quite some time and is still used by a number of users across the world, it is time for it to make way for other competitors to be tried and tested. Sensu is one such tool that has won recognition among a lot of developers and administrators.
So if you are looking for a monitoring tool that is easy to install and use, you must think seriously about Sensu.
