Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

October 2018

Announcing Tessen, the Sensu call-home service

As a monitoring company, it’s only natural that we’d always seek more data to inform our product decisions. With that in mind, we created Tessen, a hosted Sensu call-home service. Tessen is opt-in for the current version of Sensu, but will be opt out in Sensu Go (ICYMI, here’s our product roadmap, including the GA release date). Here’s what you need to know, including what we’re collecting and how that data benefits the Sensu Community.

Pull, don't push: architectures for monitoring and configuration in a microservices era

This year at Sensu Summit, Fletcher Nichol and I gave a talk on systems architecture entitled Pull, don’t push: Architectures for monitoring and configuration in a microservices era. In this post, I’d like to reiterate and expand on some of the concepts in that presentation and make some more concrete recommendations for systems design in an era of complex distributed systems.

Alert fatigue, part 4: alert consolidation

So far, we’ve covered alert reduction with Sensu filters and token substitution; automating triage; and remediation with check hooks and handlers (links above). In this post, I’ll cover alert consolidation via round robin subscriptions and JIT/proxy clients; aggregates; and check dependencies. These are all designed to help you cut through the “white noise” and focus on what’s important (especially in the middle of a major incident).

Explore Sensu workflows & lesson plans with the Sensu sandbox

We’re excited to share that we’ve created an easy to use — and reusable — Sensu sandbox environment to help folks learn how to work with Sensu monitoring event pipelines. At Sensu Summit, we realized that many of you already had some sort of sandbox that you’d spun up to do your own testing, and demos and we’ve created something to help make things easier for everyone.

Alert fatigue, part 3: automating triage & remediation with check hooks & handlers

In many cases — as you’re monitoring a particular state of a system — you probably know some steps to triage or in some cases automatically fix the situation. Let’s take a look at how we can automate this using check hooks and handlers.