Checkmk is a software system developed in

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (prog ...

and C++ for

IT Infrastructure Information technology infrastructure is defined broadly as a set of information technology (IT) components that are the foundation of an IT service; typically physical components (Computer hardware, computer and networking hardware and facilitie ...

monitoring. It is used for the monitoring of servers,

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...

, networks, cloud infrastructures (

public In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociology, sociological concept of the ''Öf ...

private Private or privates may refer to: Music * "In Private", by Dusty Springfield from the 1990 album ''Reputation'' * Private (band), a Denmark-based band * "Private" (Ryōko Hirosue song), from the 1999 album ''Private'', written and also recorded ...

hybrid Hybrid may refer to: Science * Hybrid (biology), an offspring resulting from cross-breeding ** Hybrid grape, grape varieties produced by cross-breeding two ''Vitis'' species ** Hybridity, the property of a hybrid plant which is a union of two diff ...

containers A container is any receptacle or enclosure for holding a product used in storage, packaging, and transportation, including shipping. Things kept inside of a container are protected on several sides by being inside of its structure. The term ...

, storage,

databases In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and ana ...

and environment

sensors A sensor is often defined as a device that receives and responds to a signal or stimulus. The stimulus is the quantity, property, or condition that is sensed and converted into electrical signal. In the broadest definition, a sensor is a devi ...

. Checkmk is available in four editions: an open source edition (Checkmk Raw Edition), a commercial enterprise-grade edition (Checkmk Enterprise Edition), a commercial edition with advanced cloud monitoring features (Checkmk Cloud Edition), and an edition for

managed services Managed services is the practice of outsourcing the responsibility for maintaining, and anticipating need for, a range of processes and functions, ostensibly for the purpose of improved operations and reduced budgetary expenditures through the ...

providers (Checkmk Managed Services Edition). These Checkmk Editions are available for a range of platforms, in particular for various versions of

Debian Debian () is a free and open-source software, free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock in August 1993. Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kerne ...

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

, SLES and

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

, 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 An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

through a

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

and to enable high-availability solutions. The agents used by Checkmk to collect data are available for 11 platforms, including

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

History

Checkmk originated in 2008 as an

Agent Agent may refer to: Espionage, investigation, and law *, spies or intelligence officers * Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another ** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuran ...

-substituting

shell script A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by a Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be command languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipu ...

for

Inetd inetd (internet service daemon) is a super-server Daemon (computer software), daemon on many Unix systems that provides Internet services. For each configured service, it listens for requests from connecting clients. Requests are served by spawn ...

, and was published in April 2009 under

GPL The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first c ...

. It was initially based on

Nagios Nagios is an event monitoring system that offers monitoring and alerting services for servers, switches, applications and services. It alerts users when things go wrong and alerts them a second time when the problem has been resolved. Ethan ...

, and extended this with a number of new components. The open source edition (Checkmk Raw Edition) also continues to be based on the Nagios-core, and bundles this with additional open source components into a complete system. Over many years, Checkmk's commercial editions have evolved into a self-contained monitoring system – one that has replaced all of the essential Nagios components with its own – including its very own monitoring core. The majority of the developments for the commercial editions, in particular all plug-ins, are also available into the Checkmk Raw Edition.{{{cn, date=January 2025 While in the past Checkmk was designed for monitoring large and heterogeneous on-premises environments, from version 1.5+ (1.5p12) it also supports the monitoring of AWS, Azure, Docker and

Kubernetes Kubernetes (), also known as K8s is an open-source software, open-source OS-level virtualization, container orchestration (computing), orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Googl ...

services.{{{cn, date=January 2025 Checkmk is being developed by Checkmk GmbH in

Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

. Until 16.04.2019 it operated under the name of Mathias Kettner GmbH, at which point the company was rebranded to tribe29 GmbH, while the product name "Check_MK" was also changed to "Checkmk". A subsequent rebranding took place on 14.04.2023, when the company has been renamed to Checkmk GmbH.{{{cn, date=January 2025 Checkmk GmbH follows an open core business model. The open source edition is available under different open source licenses – mostly GPLv2, while large parts of the commercial editions run under the proprietary "Checkmk Enterprise License".{{{cn, date=January 2025

The Product

Checkmk combines three types of IT monitoring: * Status-based monitoring, which records the "health" of a device or application, via thresholds. * Metric-based monitoring that enables the recording and analysis of

time series In mathematics, a time series is a series of data points indexed (or listed or graphed) in time order. Most commonly, a time series is a sequence taken at successive equally spaced points in time. Thus it is a sequence of discrete-time data. ...

graphs Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties * Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...

using a

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

-based graphing system. An integration with

Grafana Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It can produce charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources. There is also a licensed Grafana Enterprise version ...

is available as well. * Log-based and

event Event may refer to: Gatherings of people * Ceremony, an event of ritual significance, performed on a special occasion * Convention (meeting), a gathering of individuals engaged in some common interest * Event management, the organization of eve ...

-based monitoring, in which key events can be filtered out and actions can be triggered based on these events.{{{cn, date=January 2025 In order to ensure a very broad monitoring, Checkmk currently has 2000+ 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 Legacy or Legacies may refer to: Arts and entertainment Comics * " Batman: Legacy", a 1996 Batman storyline * '' DC Universe: Legacies'', a comic book series from DC Comics * ''Legacy'', a 1999 quarterly series from Antarctic Press * ''Legacy ...

Nagios plug-ins is possible as well.{{{cn, date=January 2025 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 Workflow is a generic term for orchestrated and repeatable patterns of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequen ...

. This includes: * Auto-discovery of hosts (where applicable) * Auto-discovery of

services Service may refer to: Activities * Administrative service, a required part of the workload of university faculty * Civil service, the body of employees of a government * Community service, volunteer service for the benefit of a community or a ...

* Automated configuration of plug-ins via preconfigured thresholds and rules * Automated agent updates (a CEE feature) * 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 (starting from CEE v1.6) * Automated discovery of tags and labels from sources such as Kubernetes, AWS and Azure (starting from CEE v1.6){{{cn, date=January 2025 In addition, there are also playbooks for the use of configuration and deployment tools such as

Ansible The term ''ansible'' refers to a category of fictional technological devices capable of superluminal Faster-than-light (superluminal or supercausal) travel and communication are the conjectural propagation of matter or information faster than ...

Salt In common usage, salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl). When used in food, especially in granulated form, it is more formally called table salt. In the form of a natural crystalline mineral, salt is also known as r ...

. Checkmk is often used in very large distributed environments where a high number of sites (e.g., 300 locations of

Faurecia Forvia SE (stylized in all-uppercase), formerly Faurecia SE, is a French global automotive supplier headquartered in Nanterre, in the western suburbs of Paris. In 2022 it was the 7th largest international automotive parts manufacturer in the worl ...

) and/or well over 100,000 devices (e.g.

Edeka The Edeka Group is the largest German supermarket corporation , holding a market share of 25.3%. Founded in 1907, it currently consists of several co-operatives of independent supermarkets, all operating under the umbrella organisation ''Edeka ...

) are monitored. This is possible, among other things, because Checkmk's microcore consumes much less

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, log ...

resources than, for example, Nagios’, and therefore offers a significantly higher performance on the same hardware{{Original research inline, date=August 2022. Furthermore, the non-persistent data is stored in-memory in

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

which significantly improves the access time.{{{cn, date=January 2025

Components

Monitoring core

Checkmk Raw Edition uses the

monitoring core. Checkmk commercial edition uses the proprietary "Checkmk Microcore" (CMC) monitoring core, written in C++. It has better performance than Checkmk Raw Edition core{{Original research inline, date=August 2022. It supports recording of objects with a short lifespan, such as containers. It does not require a reboot to apply configuration changes.{{{cn, date=January 2025

Configuration & Check Engine

Checkmk offers self-contained service discovery and settings generation. Checkmk uses its own method when carrying out the ''checks''. During the test period each ''host'' is contacted only once. The test results are transmitted to the monitoring core as ''passive checks''. This significantly improves the performance on the ''monitoring server'', as well as on the hosts being monitored.{{{cn, date=January 2025 Checkmk uses different methods to access the data in the target systems. These include agents installed on the target system, "special agents" running on the monitoring server and communicating with the

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

of the target system, the

SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behavior. Devices that typically su ...

API for monitoring, for example, network devices and printers, and

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...

/ TCP protocols to communicate with web and internet services. By default, Checkmk follows the "pull principle", i.e. the data is explicitly queried by the monitoring system to quickly identify when a system suddenly fails and does not respond to a "pull". As an alternative, however, a "push" can be configured with which the system transfers its data directly to Checkmk or to an intermediate host.{{{cn, date=January 2025

Data Interface ("Livestatus")

Livestatus is the main interface in Checkmk. It provides live access to all data from the monitored hosts and services. The data is fetched directly from the RAM, which avoids slow hard disk access and gives fast access to the information without overloading the system too much. Access is done via a simple protocol and it is possible from all

programming languages A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their syntax (form) and semantics (meaning), usually defined by a formal language. Languages usually provide features ...

without requiring a special library.{{{cn, date=January 2025

Web-GUI ("Multisite")

Multisite is Checkmk’s web GUI. In addition to having a quick page layout, it offers user-definable views and dashboards, distributed monitoring by integrating multiple monitoring instances via Livestatus, integration of NagVis{{What, reason=What is NagVis?, date=August 2022, an integrated

LDAP The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP ) is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed Directory service, directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) networ ...

connection, access to status data via

web services A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

, and much more. Dashboards and views can be differentiated for various users or groups of users, for example

vSphere VMware vSphere (formerly VMware Infrastructure 4) is VMware's cloud computing virtualization platform. It includes vCenter Configuration Manager, as well as vCenter Application Discovery Manager, and the ability of vMotion to move more than on ...

-specific{{cite web , url=https://www.admin-magazin.de/Das-Heft/2019/06/vSphere-Monitoring-mit-Checkmk , title=vSphere-Monitoring mit Checkmk , author=Heike Jurzik, Marcel Arentz , publisher=

Linux-Magazin ''Linux Magazine'' is an international magazine for Linux software enthusiasts and professionals. It is published by Computec Media GmbH in German-speaking countries and Linux New Media USA, LLC. for English edition. The magazine was first publi ...

, date=2019-07-01 , accessdate=2019-07-02 , language=de views for VMware admins. The web GUI is available in several languages.

Setup

Checkmk is completely administrable via the browser via its Setup module. This includes managing users, roles, groups, time periods, and more. Permissions can be granted in a granular way using a role concept. Existing role-based access controls (LDAP, AD) can be used for this. Checkmk’s configuration is rule-based, so that it remains intuitive and scalable even in complex environments. Automated service discovery and configuration, as well as the automatic agent update, further accelerate the configuration process. An HTTP API can also be used to integrate CMDBs for accelerated configuration.{{{cn, date=January 2025

Alert System

Several notification channels can be set up and configured with different rules for each user. For example, emails can be triggered at any time of the day, but notifications via SMS are sent only for important issues during on-call hours. The notifications can be set for all or for specific teams, e.g. notify only the storage admins about a failed hard drive. Duplicate notifications are grouped together so that no user is notified twice through a particular channel. Furthermore, users can configure their own notifications themselves. In distributed environments alerts can be managed centrally. For detected issues, actions can be triggered automatically (alarm control) via scripts. Checkmk includes integrations to email and SMS gateways as well as to communication and IT service-management solutions such as Slack, Jira,

PagerDuty PagerDuty, Inc. is an American cloud computing company specializing in a SaaS incident management platform for IT operations departments. PagerDuty is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Toronto, Atlanta, London, Lisbon, Tokyo, and Sy ...

, OpsGenie, VictorOps, and

ServiceNow ServiceNow, Inc. is an American software company based in Santa Clara, California, that supplies a cloud computing platform for the creation and management of automated business workflows. It is used predominantly for the automation of informati ...

.{{{cn, date=January 2025

Business Intelligence

The BI module is integrated into the graphical user interface. It aggregates the overall status of business processes, their dependency on complex applications and IT infrastructure elements from many individual hosts and services in a rule-based manner. It can also be used to represent applications made up of microservices, which in turn consist of Kubernetes pods and deployments. In addition, worst-case scenarios can be simulated in real time and historical data can be analyzed to understand the causes of performance degradation.{{{cn, date=January 2025

Event Console

The Event Console integrates the processing of log messages and SNMP traps into the monitoring. It is configured via a flexible set of rules, and decides whether incoming messages are to be discarded or how they are to be classified. It can count, correlate, expect messages, rewrite messages, and more. Similar entries can be grouped into a single event (e.g. multiple failed logins) to keep track of events. It also has a built-in

syslog In computing, syslog () is a standard for message logging. It allows separation of the software that generates messages, the system that stores them, and the software that reports and analyzes them. Each message is labeled with a facility code, ...

daemon that receives messages directly on port 514, and an SNMP trap receiver that receives traps on port 162.{{{cn, date=January 2025

Metrics Graphing

The commercial Checkmk editions use their own metric and graphing system. Time series metrics can be analysed over long intervals using interactive HTML5 graphs. The maximum resolution is one second. Data can be imported from a variety of data sources and metrics formats (

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced or ) is an open standard file format and electronic data interchange, data interchange format that uses Human-readable medium and data, human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consi ...

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

, SNMP etc.) and stored on the disk of a long-term data storage device.{{{cn, date=January 2025 Alternatively,

Graphite Graphite () is a Crystallinity, crystalline allotrope (form) of the element carbon. It consists of many stacked Layered materials, layers of graphene, typically in excess of hundreds of layers. Graphite occurs naturally and is the most stable ...

InfluxDB InfluxDB is a time series database (TSDB) developed by the company InfluxData. It is used for storage and retrieval of time series data in fields such as operations monitoring, application metrics, Internet of Things sensor data, and real-time a ...

can be connected via an export interface. From CEE version 1.5p16 there is also a plug-in available for integrating data directly from Checkmk into Grafana for visualization purposes. The Checkmk Raw Edition currently uses PNP4Nagios as its graphing system.{{{cn, date=January 2025

Reporting

Reporting enables the direct delivery of

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

reports, ad-hoc or automatically, at regular intervals. It includes the availability analysis in which the history of the states over any desired time period can be provided with a click. Availability calculations can exclude unmonitored times, adjust the resolution, or ignore short intervals. In addition to the availability calculations, reporting also includes SLA reporting in which complex SLAs can be monitored. The reporting is only available in the commercial versions of Checkmk.{{{cn, date=January 2025

Hardware/Software Inventory

The hardware/software inventory can be used, for example, to monitor hardware and software changes, to verify the presence of installed security updates, and to update static data with dynamic parameters (for example, updating the current disk usage statistics based on monitoring data). The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) i-doit has a deep integration that enables the exchange of CMDB data with monitoring data.{{{cn, date=January 2025

References

{{cite web , url=https://checkmk.com/legal , title=Checkmk EULA , publisher=Checkmk GmbH , accessdate=2023-05-31 {{cite web , title=Checkmk Editions , url=https://checkmk.com/pricing , accessdate=2015-11-27 , publisher=Checkmk GmbH {{cite web , url=https://checkmk.com/open-source-monitoring.html , title=Open Source IT monitoring with Checkmk , publisher=Checkmk GmbH , accessdate=2019-07-01 {{cite web , url=https://checkmk.com/use-cases.html , title=Use Cases , publisher=Checkmk GmbH , accessdate=2019-06-15 {{cite web , title=Download version , url=https://checkmk.com/download , accessdate=2023-05-31 , publisher=Checkmk GmbH {{cite web , url=https://checkmk.com/cms_wato_monitoringagents.html , title=Monitoring Agents , publisher=Checkmk GmbH , accessdate=2019-06-12 {{cite web , title=Checkmk - Our Story , url=https://checkmk.com/company/about-us , accessdate=2023-05-31 , publisher=Checkmk GmbH {{cite web , url=https://checkmk.com/cms_wato_services.html#discovery_check , title=Automatic Service Discovery , publisher=Checkmk GmbH , accessdate=2017-02-17 {{cite web , url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx3rZ-MGXn8 , title=Monitoring of highly dynamic environments , publisher=Checkmk GmbH , accessdate=2019-05-07

External links

* {{Official Website, https://checkmk.com/
Computer monitoring with the Open Monitoring Distribution
(Kelvin Vanderlip, 2012-03-01)
Using the Open Monitoring Distribution(Nagios) to Monitor Complex Hardware/Software Systems
(Joe VanAndel, 2012-03-29) Free network management software Free software programmed in Python Nagios System monitors Systems management