Application performance monitoring is an essential part of understanding whether an application and its supporting infrastructure are performing as expected. Infrastructure and application metrics can help teams identify performance problems, troubleshoot incidents, and understand the experience being delivered to end users.
Hosted Graphite specializes in monitoring systems. You can use our product with minimal configuration to gain in-depth insight into your environments. If you would like to learn more, you can book a demo with us or sign up for a free trial.
What do people want when it comes to monitoring systems?
Most businesses need monitoring systems to provide some combination of the following:
- Availability monitoring – Availability monitoring helps determine whether infrastructure, networks, servers, and services are available and operating as expected.
- Web performance monitoring – This focuses on the performance of web applications and services. Common metrics include response times, error rates, request rates, and other indicators that can help identify performance issues.
- Application performance monitoring – Application monitoring provides visibility into the health and performance of applications, helping development and operations teams detect and troubleshoot problems.
- Security monitoring – Security monitoring can identify unusual activity and other events that may indicate security problems.
- Real user monitoring – Real user monitoring captures information about actual user interactions with an application, helping teams identify performance and user-experience issues.
In the following sections, we'll take a look at two monitoring technologies: Sensu and Graphite. Sensu provides a monitoring and observability platform for infrastructure, applications, and services, with support for checks, events, metrics, and automated workflows. Graphite is focused primarily on storing, querying, and visualizing numeric time-series data.
The main features of Sensu monitoring
The following are some of the main features of Sensu:
Infrastructure and multi-cloud monitoring
Sensu can monitor infrastructure distributed across physical systems, virtual machines, containers, and cloud environments. Sensu agents execute checks and collect observability data, allowing teams to use a common monitoring workflow across different environments.
Scalable backend
The Sensu backend manages check requests and observability data and includes scheduling, event processing, an API, and a datastore. Sensu Go uses an embedded etcd datastore by default and can be deployed as a cluster for larger environments.
Real-time infrastructure visibility
Sensu entities represent the systems and services being monitored. Checks can be scheduled across groups of systems using subscriptions, making it possible to monitor dynamic infrastructure as systems are added or removed.
Alerts and incident management
Sensu's event-processing system can route monitoring events through filters, mutators, handlers, and pipelines. These workflows can be used to send alerts or integrate monitoring events with external notification and incident-management systems.
Application health monitoring and custom metrics
Sensu checks can monitor server resources, services, and application health while also collecting and analyzing metrics. Check commands are flexible, so teams can use existing monitoring plugins or their own scripts to collect the information they need.
Automated monitoring workflows
Sensu's event-processing model can be used to automate actions based on monitoring events. Instead of only generating a notification, events can be routed through handlers and pipelines that integrate with other operational tools and workflows.
The main features of Graphite monitoring
Enterprise-scale tool
Graphite is a scalable monitoring tool designed for storing and visualizing time-series data. Three core software components make up the traditional Graphite architecture: Carbon, Whisper, and the Graphite web application. Carbon receives time-series data, Whisper stores it, and Graphite Web provides an interface and API for querying and rendering that data.
Easy data feed
Feeding data into Graphite is a simple process. Once data points are sent to Carbon, they become available for storage, querying, and visualization. Graphite also provides a flexible API for querying metric data and generating graphs.
A seamless way to publish metrics
Metrics such as requests per second, CPU usage, memory utilization, and request processing time can be published to Graphite as time-series data. Each data point contains a metric name, value, and timestamp. Applications and monitoring agents can send these data points to Carbon for storage and later analysis.
Graphite web app
The Graphite web application provides an interface for navigating metrics and rendering time-series data. Graphite's API can also return metric data and generated graphs in several formats, making it possible to integrate Graphite data with other monitoring and visualization tools.
Sensu monitoring and Graphite comparison
Graphite is primarily designed for storing, querying, and visualizing numeric time-series data. Its focus is straightforward: applications and monitoring systems send metrics to Graphite, where they can be retained and queried for visualization and analysis.
Sensu, on the other hand, is a broader monitoring and observability system. Sensu checks execute commands across monitored systems and produce observability events. Those events can then be processed through monitoring pipelines for alerting, metrics collection, and automation.
The core features offered by Graphite include:
- Carbon – a listener daemon for time-series data
- Whisper – a database library for storing time-series data
- Graphite Web – a Django-based application and API for querying and rendering metric data
To read more about the structure of Graphite, check out this resource.
Sensu's core features include:
- Checks that monitor systems, services, and applications
- Event processing for alerting and automation
- Metrics collection and monitoring
- A backend and agent architecture
- An API, command-line interface, and web UI
- Written in the Go programming language
Some of the advantages of Graphite are:
- Wide support across monitoring agents and integrations
- Flexible functions for manipulating time-series data
- Long-term metric storage
- Powerful querying and graph rendering
Some of the advantages of Sensu are:
- Flexible checks for applications and infrastructure
- Support for custom check commands and scripts
- Event-processing pipelines for alerting and automation
- Support for dynamic runtime assets and existing monitoring plugins
When should I use Sensu vs Graphite?
Graphite is a good fit for teams that need to collect, store, query, and visualize time-series metrics. Ops and DevOps engineers can use Graphite to continuously monitor application and infrastructure metrics and investigate changes in system behavior.
Graphite's Carbon component receives time-series data and Whisper stores it. Graphite Web and its APIs can then query that data for visualization and analysis. This makes Graphite particularly useful when the primary goal is maintaining and exploring a historical record of numerical metrics. Graphite also supports multiple output formats through its APIs, allowing metric data and graphs to be incorporated into dashboards and other monitoring workflows.
Sensu has a somewhat different focus. It is designed around monitoring infrastructure and applications using checks and observability events. Sensu agents execute checks, while the Sensu backend schedules those checks and processes the resulting events. Those events can then be routed through pipelines for alerting, metrics processing, or other automated actions. Modern Sensu Go uses an embedded transport and etcd datastore, replacing the RabbitMQ and Redis dependencies used by the original Sensu Core architecture. The Sensu backend also provides its API and web interface, giving teams a central place to work with checks, entities, and monitoring events.
Because their core purposes are different, Sensu and Graphite don't necessarily have to be viewed as direct replacements for one another. Sensu is centered around checks, events, and monitoring workflows, while Graphite specializes in time-series metric storage, querying, and visualization.
Conclusion
Both Sensu and Graphite can play a role in application and infrastructure monitoring, but they approach the problem differently.
Sensu provides a broader monitoring framework built around agents, checks, observability events, and event-processing pipelines. This makes it useful for teams that want to monitor system and application health while also connecting monitoring events to alerting and automated operational workflows.
Graphite is focused specifically on time-series metrics. Carbon receives metric data, Whisper provides time-series storage, and Graphite Web provides APIs and visualization capabilities for querying that data.
Which approach makes sense depends on what you're trying to monitor and how you want to use the resulting data. For teams primarily interested in collecting, storing, graphing, and alerting on time-series metrics, Graphite provides a focused solution. Sensu provides additional functionality around executing checks and processing monitoring events.
Hosted Graphite provides a fully managed Graphite environment, along with Hosted Grafana dashboards, alerting, and a long list of integrations with popular technologies. You can book a demo to learn more or sign up for a free trial to get started.
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