We’re thrilled to announce that the latest release of Sensu Go — version 5.2 — is available today! Sensu Go empowers you to automate your monitoring workflows, offering a comprehensive monitoring solution for your infrastructure, applications, and connected devices. Sensu Go is a massive improvement over the original Sensu (version 1.x), with an emphasis on ease of use and quick time to value.

In part 1 of this series, I discussed the rise of microservice architecture and the reliance on Kubernetes and Docker for container orchestration and management. I also shared some of the challenges these new technologies present and what sources of data we need in order to effectively monitor our Kubernetes environments.

As a followup to my previous post, I’d like to walk you through using the Sensu Go sandbox to test upgrading different parts of the event pipeline from Sensu 1.x to Sensu Go. First up we have a Sensu 1.x check configuration using the check_ssh command from Nagios Plugins. This walkthrough can be used as a pattern for converting existing Sensu 1.x check configurations into Sensu Go.

Now that Sensu Go is out, I thought this would be a great time to circle back and follow up on the Sensu Summit 2018 breakout session concerning Sensu 1.x to Sensu Go workload migration challenges. That session had some great feedback from Sensu users; we’ve been heads down over the past few months putting the pieces together to make it easier to move your existing workloads when you upgrade to Sensu Go and keep your existing Sensu Plugins working while you transition.

Our industry has long been relying on microservice-based architecture to deliver software faster and safer. The advent and ubiquity of microservices naturally paved the way for container technology, empowering us to rethink how we build and deploy our applications. Docker exploded onto the scene in 2013, and, for companies focusing on modernizing their infrastructure and cloud migration, a tool like Docker is critical to shipping applications quickly, at scale.

Not too long ago in the Sensu Community Slack, the question: “Why Sensu instead of Nagios?” arose. Specifically, “How do I convince my boss to choose Sensu over Nagios?” I responded to the thread, but decided it was worthwhile to share my response with the wider community. At Willis Towers Watson, we moved from Nagios to Sensu 1.2 almost a year ago (and now we’re upgrading to Sensu Go).

In case you missed it, Sensu Go is here! And, as I wrote about previously, one of the hurdles with migrating workloads from the original version of Sensu to Sensu Go are the changes in the internal event data structure. The existing handlers and mutators in the community maintained Sensu Plugins collection might not work as expected in Sensu Go because of these event data model changes. But friends, I’m here to tell you that we’ve got this problem licked.

Today is the day: Sensu Go is now in General Availability (GA)! Sensu Go features human-centered design by making it easier to use Sensu; we went from operations having to do the heavy lifting to creating a user-centric, self-service, and highly scalable product.