Sensu Summit 2019 featured talks from the Sensu Community, including Harvard University SRE Molly Duggan, who shared how the Harvard FAS Research Computing Department uses CI/CD pipelines and the Sensu Go API to automate monitoring for their highly complex infrastructure.

The appeal of running workloads in containers is intuitive and there are numerous reasons to do so. Shipping a process with its dependencies in a package that’s able to just run reduces the friction of organizational communication and operation. Relative to virtual machines, the size, simplicity, and reduced overhead of containers make a compelling case.

Earlier this year, we reached an important early milestone for the next-generation Sensu Go platform with the General Availability of commercial support for Sensu Go. A few weeks later, we announced that Sensu Core 1.x – the original Sensu open source project – would reach end of life (EOL) on December 31, 2019, and that commercial support for Sensu Enterprise (latest version 3.x) would reach EOL on March 31, 2020.

Sensu Go has come a long way since its GA release in December 2019; in a little over 10 months, we've seen 14 minor version releases (5.1–5.14), including dozens of new features and product enhancements, and hundreds of bug fixes (see the changelog for more information). Here’s a high-level timeline of what we’ve accomplished...

It's hard to believe it's almost been a whole year since the Sensu Go general availability release on December 5, 2019. As we look forward to celebrating this important milestone, we are also reflecting on how the product has matured over the past year, and sharing some exciting changes that are just on the horizon (for a look at the upcoming roadmap, check out this post by Sensu Creator, Co-founder, and CTO, Sean Porter).

Monitoring systems is critical to any IT operation. For many companies, these systems are a critical business component that can have serious business impact (including expensive downtime) if these systems fail. For this reason, it is essential that you have a good monitoring system in place that you can rely on, one that notifies you early if unforeseen problems occur.

This time last year, Sensu Go hadn’t been released in General Availability (GA) yet. Now, 10 months later, version 5.14 is in production environments, monitoring infrastructure, applications, and connected devices across public and private clouds. It’s been quite a journey to get to a product that’s both a massive improvement over the original Sensu 1.x and helps customers achieve enterprise-level scale.

The growing complexity of today’s IT reality is indisputable: Software is becoming more and more complex, and the infrastructure it runs on is equally so. This complexity comes, in part, from adding layers upon layers to the infrastructure we manage — from bare metal servers to VMs to containers to function-based computing — and from how quickly we cycle in new technologies and how slowly old technologies are cycled out.