As more businesses move to the cloud, monitoring and management tools become crucial to ensure smooth operations. In the vast sea of monitoring tools, two popular open source ones are Sensu and Zabbix. In this blog post, we compare the two and provide an unbiased recommendation on which tool to choose.
Flexibility
Sensu markets itself as an event pipeline and monitoring tool, giving it a lot of flexibility in how it can be used. It's often used by teams that develop software and provides a more modern approach to monitoring. Sensu can support both agent-based and agentless monitoring and can use configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef.
Zabbix, on the other hand, is a traditional infrastructure monitoring tool, suited for monitoring networks, servers, services, and applications. It is agent-based and provides solid tracking of metrics, availability, and performance.
Winner: Tie - Both tools are highly flexible and can be adapted to different use cases.
Ease of Use
Sensu is cloud-native and designed to be managed through an API. It has a plug-in architecture, making it easy to extend its functionality. Sensu relies heavily on JSON configuration files, which suits developers who are comfortable writing code.
Zabbix has a more traditional UI and relies on a variety of components to operate, including a server, database, web interface, and agents. While it has a rich feature set, it can be intimidating for beginners.
Winner: Sensu - Sensu's API-first design and plugin architecture makes it more comfortable to use overall.
Performance
As monitoring tools, both Sensu and Zabbix need to be able to handle a significant amount of traffic. Sensu has a more optimized design and can handle more than 10,000 checks per second. It's highly scalable and can handle large infrastructures with ease.
Zabbix has more moderate requirements for hardware and can handle several thousand checks per second. It can also collect a vast amount of metrics, which can cause performance issues in very large deployments.
Winner: Sensu - Sensu's optimization and scalability make it more suitable for large deployments.
Integrations
Both Sensu and Zabbix have several integrations with other tools that can extend their functionality. Sensu can be integrated with tools like Grafana and InfluxDB, while Zabbix has integrations with JIRA and Slack.
Winner: Sensu - Sensu has more modern integrations that are more commonly used in a cloud-native context.
Community support
As open source tools, both Sensu and Zabbix have large active communities that contribute to their development and maintenance. Sensu has a highly active developer community, with lots of support for plugins and extensions. Zabbix's community is also active, with lots of documentation and support available.
Winner: Tie - Both have large and active communities.
Conclusion
While both Sensu and Zabbix are excellent open source monitoring tools, we recommend Sensu for cloud-native monitoring needs. Sensu's optimization and scalability, API-first design, and modern integrations make it a suitable choice for teams developing software in a cloud-native environment.