Sensu Targets MSPs with Multicloud Monitoring

Sensu, two years after launching a commercial venture, is offering its latest cloud and infrastructure monitoring solution for managed service providers (MSPs) and is formalizing its channel strategy in the U.S. and Canada.

Sensu, the provider multicloud solutions provider, says its offer enables MSPs to monitor dynamic workloads and various infrastructures for their customers.

“Traditional monitoring solutions for MSPs are often unable to keep up with businesses’ IT requirements,” said Caleb Hailey, CEO and co-founder of Sensu. “MSPs need tools that can meet the heterogeneous cloud and legacy monitoring demands of their various customers as they migrate to container and microservices-based infrastructure. Sensu’s multicloud monitoring solution offers MSPs the flexibility they need to support their customers across their various, and often multigenerational, infrastructures.”

Sensu works with a handful of MSPs in the U.S. but is primarily a direct sales organization. With the launch of this latest product specifically designed for MSPs, and a strategy to hire a channel executive within the next couple of months, Sensu hopes that over time, about 30% of the company’s revenue in the U.S. and Canada will be driven by MSPs.

Sensu’s sales strategy overseas is 100% channel-led by reseller partners and includes a recently developed partner program featuring deal registration and training. Sensu partners are in the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands.

Sensu’s Vikas Aggarwal

“For MSPs, we had to make sure that they had the features such as pricing, the ability to demo a product, and to be able to offer single installation for multiple customers,” Vikas Aggarwal, chief revenue officer at Sensu, told Channel Futures.

Here’s a look at some of the features in the latest Sensu offering, a subscription-based technology that gives MSPss a multitenant solution for dynamic container and Kubernetes workloads:

“Over time we’re finding from the large enterprise that business has changed. We’re seeing an obvious shift, by some of our enterprise users, in their requirements for Kubernetes and Docker monitoring,” said Aggarwal. “And that’s trickling down into the small and medium businesses, and over time – in a very short period – the requirements will also change for the SMB.”

Sensu Inc. was formalized more than two years ago after securing $2.5 million in financing. Six years prior, the organization was known as Heavy Water Operations, an internal project at Sonian. That project was to replace an aging Nagios installation unable to keep up with the evolving demands of a dynamic public-cloud infrastructure. Nagios is an open source computer software application that monitors systems, networks and infrastructure.

Today, Sensu calls it Sensu Enterprise, a Nagios alternative.