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Checkmk
What is Checkmk?
Checkmk: a leading IT monitoring system for on-premise and cloud infrastructure (servers, networks, storage, databases, and more) that enables admins, IT managers, and DevOps teams to identify and resolve issues across their entire IT infrastructure quickly.
More than 2,000 commercial customers and many more open source users use Checkmk daily to ensure high availability and performance. Available in 4 editions: Raw (open-source), Enterprise, Cloud & MSP.
Who Uses Checkmk?
Companies of all sizes as well as governmental institutions, often with multiple data centers and very large scale set-ups. Checkmk enables ITOps and DevOps teams to run their IT at peak performance.
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Reviews of Checkmk
Best monitoring solution you can find on the market.
Comments: We deliver in a sequenced order in short interval parts to our customer (JIT/JIS). The IT systems are crucial in the supply chain to the customer. With check_mk we are able to alert an issue with this IT systems before it becomes a problem for the delivery process. check_mk is used in a highly distributed way at over 300 sites with one central configuration platform which allow us to quickly implement new monitoring solutions and standards.
Pros:
check_mk is a very intuitive, easy to use and easy to setup monitoring system. It scales perfect vertically and also horizontal. it provides already a huge amount of monitoring functionalities for a lot of environments and it is quite simple extensible with own functionalities. Beside state based monitoring it has also a complete solution to integrate event based monitoring. With the Business Intelligence we are able to picture our mission critical processes in monitoring and able to simulate the impact of outages to the business.
Cons:
The design of the front-end is a bit vintage style and is in hour highly distributed implementation somehow slow.
Alternatives Considered:
Check_MK as a single pane of glass
Comments: Providing infrastructure monitoring to everyone involved in IT provision, whatever their level of technical knowledge. I did the initial deployment, and then sold the product to the rest of the team managing the infrastructure. I found it easy to set up, and to import an initial set of hosts, and fairly simple to explain to others.
Pros:
We are using the Raw Edition, monitoring over 7000 services on nearly 400 hosts. Although we have another product for monitoring switches and routers, we have integrated status updates from that product into the Check_MK view, so we have a single pane of glass. Almost every aspect of the software can be configured through a web page. It's relatively easy to extend and even modify the supplied checks, and if you do, you don't prevent future upgrades, because the upgrade process supports merging of modifications. The agents are read-only, so inherently more secure, and pretty simple to install. The BI feature enables us to provide monitoring of the business services people actually use, as well as the underlying infrastructure. When there are failures, you can drill down to see which component actually failed, and when. The automatic generation of graphs makes it easy to do trend analysis.
Cons:
I didn't find it easy to understand the way to use tags. The difference between maintenance windows on hosts and those on services is also not obvious, and similarly acknowledgements on hosts and on services. But these are minor issues.
Best Budget monitoring software, but you get what you pay for
Comments: It's free, so that's great. You will sink more time into it to get it running as you like compared to other slicker monitoring programs, it's up to you if that's a fair trade off.
Pros:
Lots of features and customization, very affordable
Cons:
Overwhelming amount of options that aren't that well organized or explained, tricky to manage services and hosts
A continuously improving monitoring tool
Comments: Checkmk is an easy-to-set-up monitoring tool with good support and a great community. It's worth staying up to date.
Pros:
What I like about checkmk is its continuous development. New features are constantly being added. Not only does it keep up with the times and monitor current technologies, but the developments for individual customers are available to everyone. This has led to a somewhat overloaded product, which, however, has become much simpler and more user-friendly again since version 2.0.0 at the latest.
Cons:
Users with little experience are often overwhelmed, and error messages can be misleading without deeper analysis.
tribe29 Response
3 months ago
Dear Eduard, Thank you for your positive feedback! We are glad to hear that you support the direction we are taking with Checkmk. We strive to create a product that works best for our users. If you’d like to help us in this endeavor, please consider subscribing to our UX Research mailing list to learn about opportunities to shape Checkmk’s future: https://lists.checkmk.com/mailman3/postorius/lists/ux-research.lists.checkmk.com/ Best regards, Your Checkmk Team.
Alternatives Considered:
Outstanding Customize, Scale & Performance vs. easy of use
Comments:
We use Check_MK to 24x7 monitor our IT-Infrastructure from bare metal devices, the network, to our apllications which are hosted onpremis and in the cloud. The monitoring is very stable and performant. We use aswell the BI features to build dependency trees to make the availablility of single applications/IT-Services visible for all our users and the management. In that case we make use of the API to integrate those numbers in our Intranet and existing Management dashboards.
We picked Check_MK because we liked the many integration possibilties and becase it scales.
Pros:
We liked the thousend of customizing possibilities to build the monitoring for our needs. Another plus is that CMK comes with a lot of checks for different devices included so you can monitor the most things right away. The new Business Intelligence "module" and the Reporting features is awesome :-) There is a free & paid version available, so you can start free and upgrade if you need more features. The new and automatically generated Network Topology is very nice
Cons:
- Finding the correct ruleset to tune the values for a check is sometimes not that easy :-) - Handling in general and the UI could be more intuitive/easier - Troubleshooting is sometimes not easy, and requieres you to be aware of the commandline of cmk and the correct paths to check the logs. (What about a cool Log overview directly in the Web UI? And a log bundle collector to report issues in the forum/support.)
