Icinga vs Sensu Go
Icinga
icinga.comSensu Go
sensu.ioSide by side
| Figure | Icinga | Sensu Go |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $166.67/mo | $3/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 3 |
| Spec score · Infrastructure Monitoring | 8.6 (#5) | 8.1 (#14) |
| Spec score · Server Monitoring | 8.6 (#9) | 8.1 (#17) |
| Spec score · Container Monitoring | 8.4 (#12) | 8.1 (#25) |
| Founded | 2009 | 2017 |
| Integrations | The maker lists integrations including Grafana, InfluxDB, Elastic, Graylog, Ansible, Puppet, Terraform, AWS, Azure, Jira, PagerDuty, and ServiceNow. | Sensu names Elasticsearch, Splunk, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Ansible Tower, Prometheus, and Nagios among its integrations and compatible tools. |
| Purpose | Icinga monitors infrastructure and applications, collecting and analyzing data to help teams identify and resolve errors. | Sensu Go is a commercial monitoring and observability solution for enterprises, designed to help DevOps and SRE teams automate monitoring workflows and see infrastructure from Kubernetes to bare metal. |
| Security | Icinga says communication between nodes uses TLS/SSL and provides certificate tools for creating or using a certificate authority. | Sensu lists LDAP, Active Directory, and OIDC SSO, mTLS certificate authentication, external PKI verification, and CRL support. |
Plans
Icinga
- Forever Free EditionFree
- Module Subscription$2,000 a year
- Repository Subscription$5,000 a year
- Support Subscription$15,000 a year
In their own words
Icinga
Icinga monitors infrastructure and applications, collecting and analyzing data to help teams identify and resolve errors. It covers servers, applications, and network devices across on-premises and cloud environments. Dashboards, filtered and grouped views, and notifications provide visibility, while troubleshooting entry points support root-cause investigation. Teams can extend monitoring with clustering, custom checks, plugins, configurable logic, and distributed environments. Listed integrations include Grafana, InfluxDB, Elastic, Graylog, Ansible, Puppet, Terraform, AWS, Azure, Jira, PagerDuty, and ServiceNow. The free edition supports API automation and Git-based workflows; the pricing FAQ describes a REST API for custom integrations. Icinga says node communication uses TLS/SSL and provides certificate tools. It can monitor certificates, alert as they approach expiry, and verify self-signed certificates using a custom trust store. The product is self-hosted and supports Linux and Windows; official packages cover several Linux distributions and Windows, with some requiring a paid subscription. The free, open source edition includes unlimited hosts and services. Paid support and subscriptions are also available, with support starting at $15,000 a year.
Sensu Go
Sensu Go is a commercial monitoring and observability solution for enterprise DevOps and SRE teams overseeing infrastructure from Kubernetes to bare metal. It collects, filters, and transforms monitoring events before sending them to a database chosen by the customer. Teams can manage declarative monitoring configuration, check system and service health, collect metrics and logs, and run custom scripts including Nagios-style plugins. Agents discover virtual machines, public cloud compute instances, containers, and services. Sensu can alert by email, Slack, or SMS, create or resolve incidents in PagerDuty, ServiceNow, and JIRA, and deduplicate alerts. It also supports remediation actions such as restarting services or running scripts. Sensu Go is self-hosted and free for up to 100 nodes at one site. Pro costs $36 per year, billed annually, with a 100-node minimum; this equals $3.00 per node/month when billed annually. The free 14-day trial is for evaluating beyond 100 nodes. The backend is unsupported on Windows and macOS.