Sensu 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

Name: Sensu
Rating: 4.8 (13 reviews)

Software Advice offers objective insights based on verified user reviews and independent product and market research. When our advisors match you to a software provider, we may earn a referral fee.

How Software Advice ensures transparency

Software Advice lists all providers across its website—not just those that pay us—so that users can make informed purchase decisions. Users can talk to our advisors for free to receive software recommendations matching their needs. Software providers pay us for sponsored profiles to reach users interested in their products.

How Software Advice verifies reviews

Software Advice carefully verified over 2 million reviews to bring you authentic software experiences from real users. Our human moderators verify that reviewers are real people and that reviews are authentic. They use leading tech to analyze text quality and to detect plagiarism and generative AI.

Independent research methodology

Researchers at Software Advice use a mix of verified reviews, independent research, and objective methodologies to bring you selection and ranking information you can trust. While we may earn a referral fee when you visit a provider through our links or talk to an advisor, this has no influence on our research or methodology.

Wondering if Sensu is right for your organization?

Our IT Management Software selection experts can help you in 15 minutes or less.

On this page

Overview
Pricing and Plans
Features
Integrations
User Reviews

Overview

Sensu

4.8

(13)

Pricing

Starting at $600.00 per month

About Sensu

Sensu is a cloud-based network monitoring solution that assists businesses of all sizes with performance data collection and diagnostics. Its key features include server performance, bandwidth monitoring, uptime monitoring, network resource management and event logs.

The application comes with a module that enables network teams to monitor ephemeral container infrastructures such as Kubernetes, RedHat OpenShift, Docker, Mesos, Cloud Foundry and collect events, metrics and labels. Teams can use this system to collect StatsD and Prometheus metrics and store data with tools including InfluxDB, ElasticSearch or Splunk. Network managers can use this solution to monitor large-scale environments by traversing complex network topologies such as NATs, VPNs and firewalls.

Sensu is compatible with monitoring tools such as Nagios and Zabbix and provides alerts on the aggregate health of a service across multiple nodes. It is available on a monthly subscription and support is provided via phone, email and online help desk.

Sensu Screenshots

Sensu Pricing and Plans

Starting price: $600.00 per month

Free Trial

Free Version

Basic

$600.00

per feature, per month

No plan information available

Confused about pricing? We've got you covered.

Get a personalized pricing breakdown tailored to your specific needs—no guesswork, no generic estimates.

Sensu Features

Popular features found in IT Management
Access Controls/Permissions
Capacity Management
Compliance Management
Incident Management
Issue Auditing
License Management
Maintenance Scheduling
Remote Access/Control
Server Monitoring
Ticket Management
More features of Sensu
Activity Dashboard
Activity Tracking
Alerts/Notifications
API
Availability Testing
Bandwidth Monitoring
CPU Monitoring
Customizable Dashboard
Dashboard
Diagnostic Tools
Email Monitoring
Event Logs
FTP Monitoring
Mail Server Monitoring
Monitoring
Multitenancy
Network Analysis
Network Monitoring
Network Resource Management
Performance Metrics
Performance Monitoring
Real-Time Data
Resource Management
Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management
Third-Party Integrations
Uptime Reporting
Virtual Machine Monitoring

Sensu Integrations

PagerDuty

ServiceNow

JIRA Service Management

Jira

Slack

Sensu User Reviews

Overall Rating

4.8

Ratings Breakdown

77%

23%

Secondary Ratings

Ease of Use

4.5

Value for money

4.8

Customer support

4.7

Functionality

4.5

Sayanta B.

Verified reviewer

Research

51-200 employees

Used other for free trial

Review source

Reviewed March 2021

A nice product

The overall experience with this software is really good and I recommend everyone to use it.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Sensu is one of the most amazing Software that turn key observability and pipelines for DevOps and SRE team. The most important thing I like about this software is the Sensu's end to end observability pipeline with which we can collect, filter and transform monitoring events.

Cons:

There are literally nothing that I don't like about this software. This is really a good pipelining tool.

Christian M.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

51-200 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed March 2019

Awesome monitoring framework with unlimited integration possibilities

Sensu Go is a powerful framework to build an event pipeline tailored to the needs of their users. Events can be gathered via various different ways and processed highly accurate via handlers. Sensu Go has its strength in dynamic environments and when it is interconnected with other tools of the IT environment used by administrators and managers.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The monitoring framework following the microservice approach gives users the ability to fully embed Sensu Go into their environment and workflows. The strengths of Sensu Go consist in giving users endless possibilities to process events using the event pipeline with filters and mutators. Handlers represent the integration to 3rd party tools, which could be everything you can think of. Every event is processed as a json object, what makes it very easy to build interfaces between Sensu Go and $product - you name it. On the other hand the agent is able to gather information in different ways. It supports several plugin output formats, what gives the possibility to choose from a pool of thousands plugins, scraping Prometheus Exporters, or just using in-house developments. Furthermore it supports to accept events/metrics via Agent API or the built-in StatsD listener. The documentation is awesome and complete. Since it is API-driven, users are able to fully automate Sensu Go using configuration management tools like Ansible, Chef, Puppet or Salt. The slack community is big and you can get help quickly.

Cons:

Coming from classic montioring tools it takes some time to understand how Sensu Go works, but it's definitely worth it. At the moment Sensu Go brings some in-built filters (and simple filter examples in the docs) and some maintained handlers. If users want to go beyond that they need to look for community-implementations or write own filter expressions and handlers, what assumes that they are able to script or understand javascript (for filter expressions), golang or any other programming language (for handlers). What sounds like a con in one way is a pro in another, because it gives the user endless possibilities.

Justin S.

Verified reviewer

Computer Software

51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed July 2019

Big improvement over Nagios, but still room for growth

After maintaining a Nagios XI installation for a few years, I decided to switch to Sensu because I can tell that Nagios is a creaking giant that doesn't meet the needs of the modern world especially well without a *lot* of elbow grease. Sensu's backend and deployment is considerably easier than Nagios, but the GUI and documentation still need a lot of work. Some of Sensu's best features, like assets, tarballs that package up programming language runtimes for easy deployment, aren't easy for smaller teams like mine to implement because the documentation talks about them as if you already know how to implement them. I've already been in touch with our Sensu account manager, and to their credit, they arranged for a meeting with one of their higher-ups to discuss our concerns. I think Sensu still has room for improvement before it's a truly good fit for a small business environment like mine, but it's still a solid improvement in some ways over what I was using with Nagios XI.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Functionality

Pros:

Sensu Go, the new version, is easy to deploy, and it's considerably easier to manage and scale as compared to Nagios, which we had been using.

Cons:

The GUI interface still needs a lot of work; it's quite spartan compared to Nagios XI. The documentation isn't especially beginner-friendly; it lacks "hello world" examples and seems to assume that you're already intimately familiar with some of the concepts.

Ben A.

Verified reviewer

Computer Software

201-500 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed March 2019

Best monitoring Framework, not the best monitoring product

I have used sensu for 4+ years and have become a maintainer in the last couple years. I really love seeing the diverse use cases that sensu helps organizations accomplish with core features as well as the community maintained plugins. Sensu has a really great community where I have had the benefit of leveraging many community contributions but been able to give back to such an awesome community. If you ever want to get involved with `core`, `sensu-plugins`, or the various CM (config management) projects reach out to me on the community https://slack.sensu.io

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

While many monitoring solutions try to be an out of box solution that is easy to get going and perform a prescriptive path Sensu took a step back and said instead of building a product we should build a framework. By taking the stance of framework first and product second what you get is a truly great experience where things work with little to no effort to get it spun up and going you can do so much more with it than the developers ever imagined people would use it. If you are willing to write code you can do pretty much anything you want by leveraging their framework and event pipeline. This can include writing new checks, metric gathering scripts, TSDB shippers, automated triage, automated remediation, etc.

Cons:

Losing a lot of flexibility with filters in the transition from `sensu-ruby` to `sensu-go` but for most use cases you probably won't notice.

Jared L.

Verified reviewer

Computer Software

1001-5000 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed June 2019

A powerful monitoring event pipeline

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Functionality

Pros:

Sensu provides an extremely flexible monitoring event pipeline for users of all sizes. Sensu is available as an open source, MIT licensed product allowing even the smallest organizations to leverage Sensu to provide a robust and flexible monitoring pipeline for all of their environments. Additionally, Sensu provides enterprise features (LDAP, AD, native external integrations) along with an incredible support team for their enterprise version. Sensu provides native primitives that allow users to significantly reduce alert fatigue via filters, dependencies, aggregations, and scheduled silences. These primitives increase the value of Sensu monitoring event pipelines allowing "robots" to do the initial alert remediation and only notifying a human when there's real issues.

Cons:

Sensu Core and Sensu Go both provide dashboards. In my experience, the larger the Sensu installation, the harder the provided dashboards become to use. However, Sensu Go now has native RBAC controls and appears to be significantly improving the dashboard with each release.

Cameron S.

Verified reviewer

Transportation/ Trucking/ Railroad

10000+ employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed October 2019

I Enjoy Using Sensu

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

I like how customizable and flexible Sensu is. It lets us get very granular so we can set different thresholds for different servers, and send different alerts from the same server to different teams. It is not all or nothing per servers. You can also have multiple handlers for each check, so you can send events to more than one place. There are a lot of different TSDB handlers as well.

Cons:

Out of the box, it doesn't really do much aside from send keepalives. It would be nice if it came predefined with CPU/Memory/Disk checks

Oscar M.

Verified reviewer

Financial Services

201-500 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed February 2019

Great features but lacks maintainers

Sensu is amazing and i'm going to continue to use it. The community features such as the plugins and slack channels are awesome. I hope they keep listening to the community and once Sensu Go is more stable I will be moving there as well.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

So many important features and integrations. Awesome community plugins.

Cons:

Most people do not manually instal sensu, they use config management, yet the documentations on how to get up and running using ansible or chef is very weak. This is present inside the community plugins and handlers. Do you know how hard it was to try and link sensu/chef/slack using the community plugins? There was no mentions of a sensu_snippet any where in the docs.

Verified

Reviewer

Internet

201-500 employees

Used weekly for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed April 2019

keep tabs on your system health and performance

useful monitoring tool with enough flexibility and ease of use to be worthwhile.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Functionality

Pros:

easy to configure and maintain service monitoring via json files. Works with existing Nagios plugins, as well as a suite of plugins for sensu written in ruby. integrates well via webhooks with other notification tools (slack, pagerduty).

Cons:

some seemingly simple functions like service dependencies can be tricky to implement properly. Can't set a different retry interval once a problem is detected, like you can in nagios. documentation is just ok. Initial setup can be challenging to troubleshoot.

Verified

Reviewer

Computer Software

51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed September 2019

Sensu is just an Awesome monitoring platform

This has made monitoring all our cloud instances so easy .......

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Functionality

Pros:

This was 100% designed to monitor cloud infrastructure and is so versatile

Cons:

I think it is time to add an admin interface of some sort.

Reasons for choosing Sensu

After doing a lot of research we decided to go with Sensu and it is great.

Soham C.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

501-1000 employees

Used weekly for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed April 2019

Sensu review

As an administrator, I like the product. I haven't tested sensu go, hopefully it will be better than the current version.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

I did several PoC of Sensu and demonstrated it to a handful of clients. What I found from my PoC is that, unanimously everyone liked the solution. I personally found it interesting enough to propose it to the clients. The ease of configuration is definitely worth a mention, specially so with the ansible repository. It perfectly does what it advertises. I haven't dug very deep into the myriad customization available because I didn't need to. As a monitoring solution it pretty much serves perfectly.

Cons:

The graphical dashboard (uchiwa) is pretty bare bones. It would be useful to have some more elegance (UI/UX wise) and bells and whistles into it. Another feedback that I obtained is that some folks wanted to set up monitoring/alerting from a graphical interface. I don't know whether open source sensu provides that.

Showing 1 - 10 of 13 Reviews

See All Reviews