Grafana OnCall vs Sensu Go
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Grafana OnCall | Sensu Go |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 15 · At risk | 82 · Excellent |
| Status | Archived | Actively maintained |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Language | Python | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 512 MB | 512 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, helm | docker, kubernetes, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 3,886 | ★ 1,112 |
| First released | 2021 | 2018 |
| Replaces | PagerDuty, Opsgenie | Datadog, PagerDuty |
What are Grafana OnCall and Sensu Go?
Grafana OnCall
Grafana OnCall is an on-call management tool that handles alert escalation, schedules, and notifications across phone, SMS, Slack, and more. It deduplicates and routes alerts so the right person is paged.
- On-call schedules and rotations
- Escalation chains
- Phone, SMS, and chat alerts
- Alert grouping and routing
Sensu Go
Sensu Go is a monitoring event pipeline that treats monitoring as code. It collects check results from agents, processes them through filters and handlers, and integrates with metrics and alerting backends.
- Monitoring as code workflow
- Event filtering and handlers
- Agent and agentless checks
- Built-in metrics support
Grafana OnCall vs Sensu Go: key differences
The biggest difference is maintenance: Grafana OnCall's repository is archived and no longer developed, while Sensu Go is actively maintained. Grafana OnCall is written in Python, while Sensu Go is built with Go. Licensing differs — AGPL-3.0 for Grafana OnCall versus MIT for Sensu Go. Sensu Go is the more established project (first released 2018), while Grafana OnCall arrived in 2021. Grafana OnCall has the considerably larger community, at 3,886 GitHub stars versus 1,112.
Why pick each one
Choose Grafana OnCall if…
- Strong PagerDuty alternative
- Integrates with Grafana
Watch out for
- Several components to deploy
- Telephony needs external provider
Choose Sensu Go if…
- Declarative configuration
- Flexible event pipeline
Watch out for
- Smaller community after acquisition
- Concepts take time to learn
Frequently asked questions
Is Grafana OnCall or Sensu Go better?
Neither is universally better. Grafana OnCall has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Grafana OnCall and Sensu Go free and open-source?
Yes. Grafana OnCall is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Sensu Go under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Grafana OnCall and Sensu Go with Docker?
Grafana OnCall: yes. Sensu Go: yes.