Grafana vs. Sensu, by Sumo Logic

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Grafana
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Sensu
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Sensu, now from Sumo Logic (acquired in June of 2021) is presented as a future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline is used by businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain visibility into their multi-cloud environments. The vendor boasts companies like Sony, Box.com, and Activision use Sensu to help deliver value to their customers. Sensu offers a comprehensive monitoring solution for enterprises, providing visibility across every…N/A
Pricing
GrafanaSensu, by Sumo Logic
Editions & Modules
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GrafanaSensu
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GrafanaSensu, by Sumo Logic
Features
GrafanaSensu, by Sumo Logic
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.0
Ratings
5% below category average
Sensu, by Sumo Logic
-
Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
6.8
Ratings
16% below category average
Sensu, by Sumo Logic
-
Ratings
Drill-down analysis6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages5.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.4
Ratings
0% below category average
Sensu, by Sumo Logic
-
Ratings
Publish to Web7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Versioning9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
7.7
Ratings
6% below category average
Sensu, by Sumo Logic
-
Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaSensu, by Sumo Logic
Small Businesses
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 7.6 out of 10
NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GrafanaSensu, by Sumo Logic
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
3.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaSensu, by Sumo Logic
Likelihood to Recommend
Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation
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Sooner or later, companies are going to figure out that there's more to monitoring than what Nagios can provide. For those that want to dip their toe in the water and still provide backward compatibility with a legacy Nagios environment, Sensu is a good choice. It's mainly for businesses that want more than Nagios but don't want to take the full plunge with something radically different and metric-based such as Prometheus. Having moved to metric-based monitoring so far as I'm able, I can say with confidence that it's far better than what Nagios or Sensu provide.
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Pros
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
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  • Unique concept as a "monitoring router" that can tie services together.
  • Backward-compatible with Nagios environments.
  • More of a DevOps focus than Nagios.
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Cons
  • Documentation needs to be more clarified since it can be confusing for beginners
  • Notification alert message templates need to be simplified
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  • Cannot be solely used for tracking metrics over time.
  • Not a very good UI.
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Usability
Great usage in terms of monitoring of any application from backend to frontend and even any AWS resource via cloud watch and other connectors. Easy to use and configure personalised dash boarding and alerting features. Cost efficient and easy to setup and run, no mazor scaling challenges in terms of managing and maintaining the stack, easy to configure via Prometheus, influx and other connectors
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
Sensu's customer support was always willing to work with us but never really seemed to learn much from our experiences. I think they get a lot of customers with DevOps IT teams that are willing to put in a lot of elbow grease to get the most of Sensu's architecture. However, despite explaining my continued disappointment with their documentation and the overall flow of the product, I never got much more than a "sorry" and a notice that their documentation was open source if I wanted to contribute to it. The problem, of course, is that you can't document what you don't understand. I'm a former technical writer, so I know that better than most.
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Alternatives Considered
Grafana is more flexible, readily adopts other tools frameworks instead of forcing you to use their agent, doesn't force you into Vendor lock-in, and embraces open source, self-hosted, and Enterprise. Similar companies would like you to use their specific tooling and don't offer nearly as much flexibility. The other thing I like about Grafana is their storage usage is much lower compared to similar tools and competitors
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Have used New Relic and Sematext Cloud for APM and for tracking over days and visualizing the issues. But those are very expensive as compared to Sensu.
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Return on Investment
  • It has kicked out some of our paid monitoring and visualization tools.
  • Now Monitoring, Visualization and Alerting is being done in a single platform.
  • It made monitoring and visualization very easy for us.
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  • Can easily understand and extend use-cases to under server capabilities.
  • Can use it to scale well.
  • Can help in efficient resource planning.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Sensu Screenshots

Screenshot of Sensu dashboard homepageScreenshot of Sensu dashboard namespace switcherScreenshot of Sensu events displayed in Grafana. In the examples above, Sensu is comfortably handling 40,000 Sensu agent connections (and their keepalives) and processing over 36,000 events per second.Screenshot of Sensu events displayed in Grafana. In the examples above, Sensu is comfortably handling 40,000 Sensu agent connections (and their keepalives) and processing over 36,000 events per second.