Sensu targets MSPs with multi-cloud monitoring, multi-tenancy
Sensu Inc. is finding an audience for its multi-cloud monitoring tool among managed service providers, which are integrating the product with their ticketing, configuration management database and event logging systems.
The Portland, Ore., company’s offering lets organizations monitor public clouds such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure and private clouds built on OpenStack, VMware and Xen. Sensu earlier this month launched a redesigned tool that offers multi-tenancy and support for container and Kubernetes workloads.
“We are seeing an uptick in popularity among MSPs,” noted Sean Porter, CTO at Sensu. “We know MSPs are dealing with a very wide breadth of technologies and we want to make sure we service that.”
Multi-cloud monitoring attracts MSP
8K Miles Software Services, an MSP and cloud consultancy based in Pleasanton, Calif., has been using Sensu for nearly two years. Sudish Mogli, the company’s CTO, said Sensu’s multi-cloud monitoring capabilities are a major attraction. 8K Miles focuses on healthcare and pharmaceutical companies that often inhabit more than one cloud.
Prior to selecting Sensu’s cloud-monitoring tool, 8K Miles said many of the tools the company evaluated were specific to a particular cloud. “We were looking for something that we could spin up in any cloud environment,” Mogli said. “Sensu met our requirement.”
Container support is another plus in Sensu’s favor, Mogli added. “We also have to look at the future in terms of how applications are being containerized” and designed for serverless architectures, he said.
Cloud monitoring tool integration
Sensu has become 8K Miles’ go-to public cloud and hybrid cloud monitoring tool, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The company has built an automation that lets it take Sensu-generated alerts and automatically open tickets in service management tools such as ServiceNow, Mogli said. Other MSPs have also taken the approach of integrating cloud monitoring tools and service management systems.
Porter said that type of integration is prevalent among customers using Sensu’s multi-cloud monitoring tool. He said MSPs integrate Sensu into ticketing applications, CMDBs and event logging systems such as Splunk. Sensu can serve as a backbone and interconnection between an organization’s systems and data formats, he added.
8K Miles, meanwhile, plans to continue its association with Sensu’s multi-cloud monitoring tool. Mogli said other vendors’ monitoring products have come and gone over the past few years, but the company has been able to stay with Sensu because of the range of technologies it covers. “At the moment, I don’t see a gap,” he noted.