Checkmk Reviews

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.

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

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.)

Excellent product that lacks in documentation and examples

Comments: Overall the application looks good. Not so much of a learning curve if you’re moving away from Nagios like I am.

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Fanastic monitoring tool - nagios replacement

Comments: We use CheckMK Raw Edition to monitor an extensive range of networking devices (routers, switches, UTMs, wireless APs, wireless point-to-point links), servers (Hyper-V, Windows and Linux), associated networked equipment (power rails, UPSs), VOIP devices including PBXs and applications. This covers approximately 400 network devices, 200 servers and 10 or so internal applications. The internal applications are monitored for uptime and availability and have customised checks to graph and monitor individual aspects of their performance.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

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.

Checkmk is a great monitoring tool

Pros:

Ease of use and the possibility to monitor everything

Cons:

How you have to configure the notifications

Best in-class IT Monitoring software

Comments: With Check_MK we have visibility and insight into the systems and applications that power our business. We know the lifecycle and usage patterns of our systems thanks to Check_MK and this is really a powerful feature when making important business decisions regarding these systems. We do not have to do guess work, it is a matter of pulling up the right view or generating the report and looking at the details. We have gained agility and gained operations performances by using Check_MK. In time it has showed to us usage patterns we were not aware of from that helped us fine-tune and optimise thereby reducing complexity/costs or both, it has provided us with instant fault-management and helped identify issues before they become critical as well as historical and trending information that help us budget and plan.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Affordable, customizable and easy to use solution

Comments: Easy to use, even if you do not have so many knowledge on Linux, the GUI is very intuitive, one of the things which I most like on this software, is the possibility to choose any thing you want to monitoring: a service, a query, a job, or you can customize and create your own template choosing what you want to monitoring, according to your environment. Last but not least: the price, compared to the other peers is very fair.

Pros:

The price of the product is pretty fair, I can say cheap of we analyze all the features which it provides. The software is able to monitoring since a simple Linux file server, to an Active Directory, Database server, it works either on Windows or Linux.

Cons:

I do not have cons about the software, the only observation, you need to have a little knowledge on open-source\Linux\Unix plataforms to customize it better.

Always the tool that saves the day

Comments: I've been using checkmk for at least 12 years and there is nothing that I couldn't deliver. It's flexibility and extended community always there for you.

Pros:

The capacity and hability that gives you to easily adapt to your own scenario

Cons:

Actually there is nothing that I can recall.

cmk in daily use

Comments: great product

Pros:

Opensource faire, works reliability, helps to avoid problems and saves money

Cons:

BI to difficult to configure, make it easy with assistants

One of the best monitoring tools on the market

Comments: Having an overview over your IT-infrastructure 24x7, recognizing misconfiguration/misbehaviour before it becomes a real problem (predictive monitoring). Being able to automate many tasks to save a lot of time with the configuration via API or through other configuration management systems (eg. I use puppet to keep the agent and the plugins up-to-date all the time). The possibilites to notify yourself, customers, co-workers, etc. are endless and also very flexible.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

The perfect monitoring solution for small, mid-sized, big and huge infrastuctures

Comments: Checkmk offers a whole monitoring framework that you can use to monitor like everything out there. With the help of the ~1800 check plugins and the ability to write your own checks you can monitor whatever you want. The amount of abilitys to do things like sending out notifications, configuration etc. are huge.
Checkmk offers a steep learning curve and the benefits you're getting from it are great and I personally learned a lots of new things with the help of Checkmk.
The insights you're getting from it are great and help to resolve problems even before they are real problems. One of the greatest things is the opensource edition (RAW Edition) of Checkmk. The ability to contribute your own code to the final product is great.
I'm working with Checkmk everyday and used almost every type they're offering (CME,CEE,RAW, virt. Appliance). I'm consulting companys in monitoring projects and my company is part of the Checkmk Partner Programm. I only had good experiences with the Checkmk Team.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

A flexible and extendable monitoring solution

Comments: We are using the Checkmk Enterprise Edition to monitor our infrastructure with around 500 hosts (Linux, Windows, Cisco, Barracuda Firewalls, VMware, Surveillance cameras, Building Access Control Systems).
The hosts are located in different sites in Germany and India. This year we are starting to monitor our user endpoints (Windows and Linux) too. We wanted to gain a better insight in which system run which OS version and patch level, hardware health, and which systems are offline for long periods of time. This works very well for us with Checkmk.

Pros:

"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.

Cons:

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.

Nagios with a twist

Comments: We are using the Checkmk Raw Edition since 1.2.something to monitor ~500 hosts (mostly Linux VMs, but some are Windows and some are actual hardware, too). Many of those run web applications which we try to monitor using active HTTP checks, too. Some specific monitoring of Docker and Kubernetes components is also used.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

One tool for monitoring "almost" anything

Comments: Here a short system overview what we do with the Enterprise Version
Monitoring of about 150K services such as
- SNMP devices
- Server Linux / Windows / AIX
- SAP
- diverse applications
- Tracking of deliveries (trains & ships)
- Tracking of large vehicles for maintenance
- Control and monitoring of the building services engineering
- Automatic ticket handling in the ServiceNow
- Alerts
... and a thousand other things

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Most powerful monitoring solution

Comments: We have only good experiences with Check_MK. We use it in large environment without any issues. We like the huge community of Check_MK.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

There are too many options to configure Check_MK.

Enterprise grade monitoring as it should be

Comments: - component based state monitoring:
-- all kind of servers (real, virtual; Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, ESX, AS400...)
-- all kind of network devices and appliances
-- full stack
- component based event monitoring
- monitoring of business processes by using the Check_MK business intelligence
- alarming via e-mails, ticketing tools, umbrella managers, SMS etc.

Pros:

- 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

Cons:

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

Perfect monitoring for heterogenous IT environments

Comments: Monitoring complex heterogeneous IT environments and capacit management.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Complete monitoring for IT infrastructure of any size

Comments: We are monitoring IT infrastructure from UPSs over servers, hypervisors, network, SAN and NAS storage up to the operating systems and databases as well as SAP for over 80 customers with Check MK and have made excellent experiences with the tool, the technical support and also the user community.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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)

One product to rule them all :-) Checkmk CEE

Comments: We monitor our whole store infrastructure:
all Media Märkte
all Saturns
over Europe
all Datacenters Frankfurt & Ingolstadt
including: Nutanix, VMware, Windows, Cisco network devices, Linux .....
All in all >21500 hosts with >162000 services and counting
All centralized from Frankfurt (WAN reaches to Portugal in the West to Turkey in the East)

Pros:

Scalability & the sheer amount of check plugins already shipped!

Cons:

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

One of my favourites software products

Comments: I think i'm very experienced. I used several setups and instances, and we're monitoring a very big branch of devices and setups and are very happy with it.
I visited both courses and i'm working for 5 years with cmk now.

Pros:

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

Cons:

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.

Monitoring has never been better

Comments: We scraped old nagios and HP solutions and use check_mk for everything related to monitoring since 4 years. Never looked back.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Monitoring that fits right into your existing infrastructure

Comments: Fully automated monitoring, alerting and performance-management for > 5000 server/network systems. It was easily integrated in the existing infrastructure (cmdb, user-authentication, alerting-infrastructure).

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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