System Sentinel LLC was founded in 1999. The Sentinel product was initially released in Q4 1999.

The founders of System Sentinel each have over 20 years of experience in building, deploying, and managing real-time market data applications on Wall Street. Our development team has built applications in the areas of: real-time market data delivery, real-time instrument control and data acquisition, dynamic publishing, expert systems, system monitoring and control.

The motivation for Sentinel arose from our combined experience in systems monitoring, and from the difficulties we encountered in trying to extend existing commercial monitoring systems to custom applications. We began to brainstorm about the features and functionality we would want in an application monitoring system: configurable behavior, flexible enough to monitor anything we could conceive of, easy to extend, minimal impact on network and monitored systems, simple to administer and use. We also knew that redundancy is an essential feature of a monitoring tool and should be designed in from the start; that monitoring of heterogeneous platforms is crucial; that it should take hours, not days, to add new monitoring functionality; that all monitoring configuration should be performed from a modern, graphical front-end. We combined these requirements with our extensive experience using existing monitoring systems, and designed and built Sentinel, the monitoring solution built by systems engineers for systems engineers.