Because Sensu is a tool made for (and by!) operators, I wanted to share our own favorite tools in the DevOps ecosystem (aside from Sensu, of course!). I surveyed the fine folks who work at Sensu on what their favorite DevOps tools are, and why. And while we don’t always agree on a specific tool (everyone has their own favorite text editor), it’s safe to say that open source is a constant theme. Read on to learn about our tools of choice for editors, programming, storage, IaC, and more.

Oh man, did I get ahead of myself in my last post! I started chatting tools, and I realize now that I really should have been talking more about why I’m using Sensu and Gremlin. But it didn’t occur to me until last year at Monitorama. John Allspaw gave the keynote talk (Taking Human Performance Seriously). While you can watch the talk here, I’ll highlight a few points...

The following is a guest post from Trey Dockendorf of Tailored Automation. He is a maintainer and the top contributor to the Sensu Puppet module. Trey has been developing Puppet modules for 10 years and specializes in system administration for high-performance computing.

A monitoring infrastructure is not much use if you’re not sure if it’s working correctly. In order to ensure its functionality, you may find a need to debug or test specific pieces of this infrastructure. In those cases, a debug handler can be a great tool to have in your Sensu Go toolbox.

This post by Manca Bizjak of XLAB Steampunk was originally published on the Ansible blog. In Getting Started With Ansible Content Collections, which presented the general idea behind what is becoming a new standard in the distribution of Ansible content, we learned about the what, the why and the how of Ansible Collections (and hopefully it got you excited about Ansible Collections!).

As with any enterprise technology, there are benefits and challenges when creating IT environments in the public cloud. The benefits include cost savings and the ability to easily scale up and down (just to name a few).

In order to determine the health and current state of your systems, monitoring by its very nature requires access to internal and external services. Traditionally, users have had to get creative in terms of how they expose sensitive information (secrets, like access credentials) to their monitoring tool; operators typically would leverage local environment variables or give up entirely by putting secrets in the monitoring configuration.

Because monitoring requires some degree of access to your applications, it’s important that you take certain steps to ensure the right amount of access without compromising your app’s security. In this first in a series of posts, we’ll go over some high-level best practices to securing Sensu, followed by a webinar later this month which will offer a deeper dive into setting up certificates.

Last month, we ran a webinar on role-based access control (RBAC) in Sensu Go. In this post, we’ll capture some of the key points from the presentation and show you how RBAC can help you lock down access for increased security and team efficiency.

At Sensu Summit 2019, Adam Westman, Sr. Engineering Manager at Target, introduced us to GoAlert, their on-call scheduling and notification open source project. In this post, I’ll recap his talk, sharing the journey that led them to build GoAlert, the problems they’ve solved, and how they use GoAlert with Sensu Go to simplify monitoring and reduce alert fatigue.