Checkmk

Checkmk is a software for IT system monitoring. It is used for the monitoring of servers, applications, networks, cloud infrastructures (public, private, hybrid), containers, storage, databases and environment sensors.

Checkmk combines three types of IT monitoring:

• Status-based monitoring, which (via thresholds) records the „health“ of a device or application.
• Metric-based monitoring that enables the recording and analysis of time series graphs. For the CEE both an HTML5-based graphing system and an integration with Grafana are available.
• Log-based and event-based monitoring, in which key events can be filtered out and actions can be triggered based on these events.

In order to ensure a very broad monitoring, Checkmk currently has 1700+ plug-ins in each edition – all of which are licensed under GPLv2. These plug-ins are maintained as part of the product and are regularly supplemented with additional plug-ins or extensions. Connecting existing legacy Nagios plug-ins is possible as well.

To simplify setup and operation, all components of Checkmk are delivered fully integrated. A rule-based 1:n configuration, as well as a high degree of automation significantly accelerate workflows. This includes:

• Auto-discovery of hosts (where applicable)
• Auto-discovery of services
• Automated configuration of plug-ins via preconfigured thresholds and rules
• Automated agent updates
• Automatic and dynamic configuration that enables the monitoring of volatile services with a lifespan of just a few seconds, such as in the Kubernetes environment
• Automated discovery of tags and labels from sources such as Kubernetes, AWS and Azure

In addition, there are also playbooks for the use of configuration and deployment tools such as Ansible or Salt.

Checkmk is available in three editions: an open source edition („Checkmk Raw Edition – CRE“), a commercial enterprise edition („Checkmk Enterprise Edition – CEE“) and a commercial edition for managed services providers („Checkmk Managed Services Edition – CME“).
These Checkmk-Editions are available for a range of platforms, in particular for various versions of Debian, Ubuntu, SLES and RedHat / CentOS, and also as a Docker Image. In addition, physical appliances of various sizes as well as a virtual appliance are offered to simplify the administration of the underlying operating system through a graphical user interface and to enable high-availability solutions.