Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Sensu VS Graphite

Compare Sensu VS Graphite and see what are their differences

Sensu logo Sensu

Monitor servers, services, application health, and business KPIs. Get notified about failures before your users do. Collect and analyze custom metrics. Give your business the competitive advantage it deserves.

Graphite logo Graphite

Graphite is a highly scalable real-time graphing system.
  • Sensu Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-10-09
  • Graphite Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-13

Sensu features and specs

  • Flexibility
    Sensu offers significant flexibility by supporting a wide range of plugins and integrations, allowing it to be tailored to almost any monitoring requirement.
  • Scalability
    The architecture of Sensu is designed to handle large-scale deployments, making it suitable for organizations of various sizes, from small startups to large enterprises.
  • Event-Driven
    Sensu's event-driven architecture allows for more efficient monitoring and alerting, ensuring that issues are identified and addressed quickly.
  • Customizability
    Users can easily write custom checks and handlers in their preferred scripting or programming languages, offering a high degree of customization.
  • Community Support
    Sensu has an active community with a wealth of shared plugins and open-source contributions, making it easier to find solutions and get support.
  • Hybrid Cloud Support
    Sensu is built to monitor across cloud and on-premises environments, making it a versatile choice for hybrid cloud strategies.

Possible disadvantages of Sensu

  • Complex Setup
    Setting up Sensu can be complex for new users, especially those without prior experience in monitoring systems or infrastructure management.
  • Resource Intensive
    Sensu's architecture can be resource-intensive, potentially requiring significant CPU and memory, particularly in large deployments.
  • Learning Curve
    Despite extensive documentation, the learning curve for Sensu can be steep, which might be a hurdle for teams new to the tool.
  • Cost
    While there's an open-source version, the enterprise features of Sensu can be quite costly, which might not be suitable for all budgets.
  • Maintenance
    Ongoing maintenance and updates can be demanding, requiring dedicated time and effort to ensure that the system remains operational and up-to-date.

Graphite features and specs

  • Scalability
    Graphite is designed for high performance and can handle large volumes of time-series data, making it suitable for scaling up as data grows.
  • Flexibility
    Graphite offers a flexible schema, allowing users to define their own metrics and naming conventions that best suit their monitoring needs.
  • Integration
    Graphite integrates easily with a variety of data sources and visualization tools such as Grafana, making it a versatile option for many monitoring setups.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source tool, Graphite has a strong community for support and contributions, and it is also free to use without licensing costs.
  • Customizability
    Graphite allows for extensive customization of dashboards and visualization options, providing users with many ways to view and interpret their data.

Possible disadvantages of Graphite

  • Complex Setup
    The initial setup and configuration of Graphite can be complex and time-consuming, often requiring in-depth knowledge of the system.
  • Performance Issues
    While Graphite is designed for high performance, it can sometimes struggle with write-heavy loads and may require additional setup to maintain efficiency.
  • High Resource Consumption
    Graphite can consume significant system resources, especially disk I/O and CPU, which might be a concern for environments with limited resources.
  • Limited Built-in Visualization
    The native Graphite-web UI is considered less feature-rich compared to more modern tools like Grafana, which may necessitate additional tools for better visualization.
  • Maintenance Overhead
    Due to its complexity and resource needs, maintaining Graphite can involve a significant overhead, particularly in larger or more dynamic environments.

Analysis of Sensu

Overall verdict

  • Sensu is a good choice for organizations seeking a versatile and comprehensive monitoring solution. Its open-source nature and active community ensure continuous improvements and adaptability to emerging technologies.

Why this product is good

  • Sensu is a popular open-source monitoring tool known for its flexibility and scalability. It supports a wide range of monitoring and alerting functions, which are highly configurable. Sensu's strengths lie in its ability to handle complex environments, offering real-time visibility into infrastructure health. It integrates seamlessly with popular tools like Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Grafana, making it suitable for modern DevOps practices. Additionally, its community and commercial support options provide robust backing for users of all scales.

Recommended for

  • Organizations with complex IT environments that require customizable monitoring solutions.
  • DevOps teams looking for a tool that integrates well with their existing infrastructure.
  • Businesses that want both community-driven open-source software and the option for enterprise-grade support.

Analysis of Graphite

Overall verdict

  • Graphite (graphiteapp.org) is generally considered a good tool for real-time graphing of time-series data.

Why this product is good

  • Graphite is appreciated for its powerful and flexible graphing capabilities, scalability, and open-source nature. It's widely used for monitoring and visualization due to its robust ecosystem and the ability to handle large amounts of data efficiently.

Recommended for

    Graphite is recommended for developers, system administrators, and IT professionals who need to monitor and visualize time-series data, particularly those working in environments with large-scale data monitoring needs.

Sensu videos

REVIEW: Sensu Artist Brush & Stylus (iPad, Android)

More videos:

  • Review - FIXING MY BIGGEST INSECURITY (My Teeth) Invisalign Journey 2020- with Sensu
  • Review - What is Sensu?

Graphite videos

Review: Samson Graphite 49 & Graphite 25 | Audio Mentor

More videos:

  • Demo - Faber-Castell 9000 graphite pencil review and tiger demo - w/ Lachri
  • Review - Graphite pencil brand review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Sensu and Graphite)
Monitoring Tools
31 31%
69% 69
Log Management
37 37%
63% 63
Website Builder
0 0%
100% 100
Performance Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Sensu and Graphite

Sensu Reviews

We have no reviews of Sensu yet.
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Graphite Reviews

The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
Although Graphite's UI might not be the most impressive, it seamlessly integrates with Grafana for improved visualizations. It's important to note that Graphite itself doesn't collect data directly; instead, applications need to be configured to send data to Graphite. Carbon then listens for this data and forwards it to Whisper, where it is stored in time series format on...
Source: betterstack.com
4 Best Time Series Databases To Watch in 2019
Graphite is a even more established and very widely used time series database system. Graphite is a powerful monitoring tool that store numeric time series data and display them on demand via its Graphite-web interface at a fair speed. Graphite is most of the time used as a system, network and application performance metric store. Big companies such as Booking.com, Reddit...
Source: medium.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Graphite seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 13 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Sensu mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Sensu yet. Tracking of Sensu recommendations started around Mar 2021.

Graphite mentions (13)

  • 11 Most Popular Tools for Logging and Monitoring API Calls
    Graphite is an open source monitoring and logging system that utilizes a push-based design architecture. What this means is that Graphite allows services to push their API logs into a component called Graphite Carbon, which is then stored in a database for later deep introspection and transformation. Prometheus, another open-source monitoring toolkit designed for cloud-native applications, is often used alongside... - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Graphite: Node-based, non-destructive, procedural 2D vector editor
    Not to be confused with: https://graphiteapp.org/ (Time Series DB) https://graphite.dev/ (Code review suite). - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Top 10 Prometheus Alternatives in 2024 [Includes Open-Source]
    Graphite is a time-series data storage and retrieval tool that can complement or replace Prometheus in certain scenarios. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • The Rise of Open Source Time Series Databases
    Graphite[1] has interesting plugin ecosystem like Grafana[2] & has been around since 2009. Architecture of Open Source Applications book[3] has done a nice overview of the architecture. I really like how it reuses linux filesystem as data store, making archiving very simple. [1]: https://graphiteapp.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • Graphite: In-development raster and vector 2D graphics editor that is FOSS
    This name is well established as a trending and graphing open source project: https://graphiteapp.org/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Sensu and Graphite, you can also consider the following products

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Nagios - Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

PagerDuty - Cloud based monitoring service