Checkmk Reviews

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.

The design of the front-end is a bit vintage style and is in hour highly distributed implementation somehow slow.

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,...

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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.

Lots of features and customization, very affordable

Overwhelming amount of options that aren't that well organized or explained, tricky to manage services and hosts

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

- 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.)

Best bang for your buck. Constantly updated to include new features, enhancements, bug and security fixes. Active community that is very helpful.

Documentation and examples are lacking though it does look like they are trying to catch up. Conferences only seem to be in Europe.

Rapidly develop passive and active checks in python is incredibly handy and has allowed us to standardise our monitoring plugins. Being able to reuse nagios plugins has helped in this migration. Customisable dashboards have been very useful. Integration with automated configuration has been straight-forward.

Not many so far - the documentation has been limited in some areas but did not impede our ability to implement checks in the way we wanted. We are waiting on the 1.7 release to more fully utilise the API.

The ability to monitor almost every device with small to little effort is great. (Out-of-the-box) The rule based configuration is one of the key features why Checkmk is superior. Performance is great, even in bigger setups (>2000 hosts). Distributed Monitoring and the ability for managed services helps a lot. Thridparty Integration is great, thanks to the open source community. You're not forced to a cloud (SaaS). All your sensitive data is stored local and you have the power over it. You're able to build your monitoring dynamic from the ground up and Checkmk helps to improve the overall quality of your infrastructure.

It takes some time to get used to the GUI because of the vast amount of features.

"If you can script it, you can do it!" I really like the ability to customize nearly everything so that the software exactly fits your needs. You can create your own checks so you can monitor custom applications or odd use cases. Checkmk offers a nice API so you can automate host creation, create your own little helper tools and much more.

The documentation lacks depth on some topics but it is getting better. When you start to use Checkmk for the first time the learning curve is a bit steep, but you get reward with a sheer endless amount of possibilities when you take time to learn.

The software is very pragmatic and provides instant results. With Check_MK you get a solution that is focused on providing the absolute best in monitoring without getting bogged down into maintaining the solution or constantly tuning to keep it running.

There is nothing that comes to mind. The product does a wonderful job for what it is intended.

Scalability & the sheer amount of check plugins already shipped!

That the ability to assign contact groupts to LDAP connections was removed. Bring it back please

Many devices can be monitored out-of-the-box because of the discovery feature of the tool. The software is easily extensible with your own scripts or check-plugins from other monitoring tools like Nagios, Icinga, Zabbix, etc. There wasn't a single device that I couldn't somehow monitor with at least a basic set of checks like the SNMP hr-MIBs. The passive checks of the agent are still one of the most appreciated features of the software.

The active check plugins from Ethan Galstad/Nagios written in C which are still being used widely, eg. check_dns could need a make-over in python (like all the native ones are), because they are either not working the way they should (eg. check_dns reports the time of it's own process, rather than the time the dns answer took) and are missing features (eg. check_dns has no clue about DNSSEC). Some of the enterprise features like the Reporting (especially PDF export functionality) should be ported over to the open-source variant (Raw Edition) of the software to be able to compete with other FOSS tools on the market.

There are tons of features: Using Checkmk allows us to monitor basic aspects about our systems rapidly using the included host agent and server side check evaluation. Additional active checks that require more domain knowledge can be easily configured using the web interface. Compared to the plain text file configuration mess that is Nagios, this is absolutely futuristic.

Due to the huge complexity of the configuration framework, it is sometimes hard to find the right location for settings and rules, but as you get more familiar with the design of the system it gets easier.

- Very fast and easy implementation - Incredible low costs - Very close communication with and fast feedback from the company behind Check_MK - Almost complete API set for all automations need for an enterprise sized infrastructure - Highly customisable, flexible and extensible by several plugin mechanisms - A vast set of monitors already shipped with the product - A very secure architecture - A limit footprint on the monitored servers and devices - No Java, no application server needed to run the product - Much more, you have to experience Check_MK

To cut a long story short: to my and all of my customers opinions there is nothing to criticise.

Automates many formerly cumbersome tasks like the discovery of hosts and services (both agent based and snmp or proprietary APIs) Offers a free open source version that packs the same checks as the enterprise version. 1700 checks for free is pretty sweet. The whole system is extremely lightweight, 4 CPUs and 4 GB memory are more than enough for medium sized environments (~200-300 hosts). Since it's open source you can always extend the system or look into the code to find out what it does on the most detailed level.

The available documentation on the website is sometimes outdated or incomplete (they are however aware of this and have made it a priority for 2019)

What I like best: - very steep learning curve - conclusive operation - very easy to define hosts and service even for beginners - very good support (Comunity & Enterprise) - more than 1700 plugins "out of the box - in the community version for free - Price performance ratio in the Enterprise Edition very good - most of the configuration can be done via the GUI with the additional option to do it on the console

I can't think of a great thing that is constantly and actively improving the system.

The best thing about check_mk is its ability to monitor all sorts of operating systems, appliances and applications in one central place. Combined with custom checks and performance data we are using it for monitoring as well as capacity management. The compatability to nagios and it's huge plugin repository made migration from classical nagios to check_mk very easy. We have been using check_mk for 5 years and are not planning to change that in the future.

The menu structure is unintuitive in some cases and the Web API does not make use of HTTP response codes (You get a 200 even if the call fails). The Agent output is not encrypted by default.

Avoids most of the headaches you get with the heavyweight solutions, that spend most of the time pumping monitoring data through a classical SQL database. Monitors eveything from network equipment, Power supply, Hardware, OS, virtualisation technology, databases, storage systems, backup and even modern stacks like docker. Also helps with automated SLA reports und software/hardware inventory. Great value for your money, there is also a community edition for tight budgets.

Because of increasing increasing popularity development of new sometimes lags behind.

It's possible to monitor almost everything. If you are trained to use it, its very easy.

It's not very easy in the beginning. Clicking trough the different views and understand where you are is very heavy in the beginning. Documentation is still not that useful.

The whole Check_MK environment has a very mature, stable foundation of supported checks and performance counters. Yet it grows almost on a daily basis. Support for new systems is being implemented very often and if you are willing to request it yourself, you can have it included in the core distribution in very little time. This agility really has no match among the larger competitors.

The Web-GUI could use a facelift, but this is already in the pipeline for the next version as I hear.

Check_MK makes it very easy monitor your environment regardless of how large you scale it. By organizing you network into logical groups (folders) you can easily create a set of monitoring parameters (thresholds, alert rules, services to monitor, etc.) and any systems added to that folder automatically get those parameters applied. Need to change the CPU alert threshold for 5000 servers? Piece of cake; simply make the change on the folder and you're all set. Additionally, Auto-discovery just works incredibly well at finding hosts and enumerating the services on your network hosts so that out of the box you have a pretty good idea of the overall health of network.

Up until version 1.5.0 the UI looked dated and navigation was counter intuitive at first. With version 1.5.0 they have overhauled the UI and it looks much better, but it could still use same layout changes to make it easier to understand and use.

The service auto-discovery with the Check_MK agent and via SNMP. No need to configure every item that should be monitored manually. The easy usable Web-GUI that also comes with an API for automation. But still everything is in configuration files that can be viewed and edited. Views, dashboards, bookmarks, custom graphs and graph collections that can be customized. Over 1700 builtin checks. A framework where plugins can be integrated easily to extend functionality of the check engine and the web application.

There is really not much I do no like about Check_MK.

- Low cost, excellent value - Great monitoring feature set - Broad range of monitoring plugins for a broad range of monitored systems - Small system footprint; product is slim and performant - Excellent scalability - Quickly implemented - Manufacturer support provided directly by experts - Manufacturer is dedicated to his product - Manufacturer is driven by what is helping his customers

- Some product features are not yet fully documented

The distributed setup in large scale environments. The easy install and configuration via Web Interface. Interfacing to other products like Grafana or i-Doit. Powerfull API for automation. The Rule based configuration is powerful very fast.

There are too many options to configure Check_MK.

Notifications, scalability, integrations

User interface, Historical data browsing is quite bad (there is a solution for that though)

Check_MK gives us all we need to monitor our server landscape. It's very stable and we did not notice major problems. It comes with a lot of useful graphs displaying current and historical data. It provides a business intelligence like feature, notofications, an event console and much more

Sometimes one might lose overview as the menus are quite "crowded"