Sensu
The Sensu Observability Pipeline delivers monitoring as code on any cloud — from bare metal to Kubernetes. Companies like Citi, Box.com, and Uber rely on Sensu to fill gaps in their observability: eliminating data silos, reducing monitoring tool sprawl, and automating diagnosis and self-healing. Founded in 2017, Sensu is built by operators, for operators, with open source at the heart of the Sensu product and company.
Sensu and InfluxData
Sensu integrates with the data platforms you’re already using (many of which you can both monitor and write data to), including InfluxDB. Sensu and InfluxDB are both open source tools with enterprise counterparts, working together to create a complete, scalable monitoring solution encompassing event monitoring and data ingestion.
With Sensu, you’ll know what’s going on everywhere in your system: Sensu supports industry-standard metric formats like Nagios performance data, Graphite plaintext protocol, InfluxDB line protocol, OpenTSDB data specification, Prometheus Exposition Text Format, and StatsD metrics. Use the Sensu agent to collect metrics alongside check results, then use the Sensu observability pipeline to route observation data to InfluxDB.
Get started with Sensu
It’s easy to get started with Sensu + InfluxDB. Follow the installation guide, then add the InfluxDB handler via a simple command-line argument.
Steps:
- Install Sensu
- Enter the command
sensuctl asset add sensu-influxdb-handler - Customize your handler via the curation template
- Start monitoring + sending data to InfluxDB
Key resources
- Docs: Sensu Go documentation
- Blog: Event Monitoring Visibility Made Easy
- InfluxDB Template: Sensu Monitoring
Observability across systems
The Sensu InfluxDB integration is a Sensu handler that sends Sensu metrics to the time series database InfluxDB so you can store, instrument, and visualize Sensu metrics data. You can also use the Sensu InfluxDB integration to create metrics from Sensu status check results for long-term storage in InfluxDB.
With the Sensu InfluxDB integration, you can:
- Transform metrics to InfluxDB format: extract and transform the metrics you collect from different sources in formats such as Graphite, OpenTSDB, and Nagios and populate them into InfluxDB
- Store check status as metrics in InfluxDB
- Use custom tags to enrich your metrics data
In the process stage of the Sensu Observability Pipeline, Sensu executes handlers to take action on your observation data. Your handler configuration determines what happens to the events that come through your pipeline. For example, your handler might route incidents to a specific Slack channel or PagerDuty notification workflow, or send metrics to InfluxDB.
VIDEO
Data Collection & Prometheus Scraping With Sensu 2.0
Sean Porter from Sensu demonstrates how Sensu 2.0 is designed to collect monitoring and telemetry data from these heterogeneous environments and store them in InfluxDB.
What's next?
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