Checkmk

4.7 (34)
Write a Review!
Infrastructure & application monitoring software

About Checkmk

Checkmk is an all-in-one IT monitoring system that helps SysAdmins and DevOps teams identify and resolve issues across their entire IT infrastructure—from simple to the most complex environments. Users are able to effectively monitor applications, servers, and networks to ensure they stay up and running through features such as state-based monitoring, log- and event-based monitoring, graphing and analytics, a customizable GUI, reporting, business intelligence, hardware and software inventory, notifications, and more.

With Checkmk’s integrated software package, users can manage state-based monitoring with 1,900 quality controlled 'smart plugins' to collect data from all kinds of hard- and software, quickly identify problems in the IT environment, and drill down with a single click. Users can also monitor logs for the analysis of error messages and forward events to trigger scripts or notifications. Tools for graphing and analytics allow users to analyze time-series metrics over long-time horizons and compare metrics across multiple graphs at a glance. Checkmk's customizable GUI allows for custom dashboards among users and groups, a customized side menu, and more.

Real-time reporting features enable users to review the history of states in one click over any desirable timeframe, as well as generate branded PDF reports. Tools for business intelligence enable users to monitor business processes by mapping dependencies of their application into a single view, as well as see availability, simulate worst-case scenarios in real time, and more. Checkmk sends out notifications to the responsible team quickly via email, SMS or 3rd party tools such as Slack, PagerDuty and VictorOps, and allows users to handle alerts centrally in distributed environments.


Key benefits of Checkmk

• Scalable monitoring with a distributed architecture: Checkmk allows users to monitor millions of services from one server with minimal required hardware investments.
• Maximize time to value: Fully automated monitoring through APIs, auto-discovery, and auto-configuration of plug-ins to save precious operator time. Low Total cost of Ownership (TCO) due to fair prices, broad automation, small footprint and fast deployment
• Reduce incidents: Ensure peak performance for your infrastructure and reduce preventable outages, late nights or weekend emergencies with Checkmk's scalable server monitoring for all environments.
• Data visualization in modern customizable dashboards: Get an overview over a group or all monitored hosts via the main dashboard. Create new dashboards using Checkmk's graphical editor.
• Suitable for modern environments: Monitor Docker and Kubernetes to assure the best performance. Checkmk is also able to bridge the gap between DevOps and Ops teams via Checkmk-Prometheus integration
• Checkmk provides flexibility through its large collection of 1,900+ plug-ins. Monitor various server types such as mail, web, database, application, FTP, and more.
• Enterprise-ready: Checkmk integrates with major ITOM/ITSM tools for seamless workflows, supports business leaders by modeling business process health and comes with secure data protection mechanisms. High availability is also assured with Checkmk's virtual and physical appliances.
• Advanced analytics to predict trends and resource utilization: Checkmk comes with a forecasting ability, so that you can plan ahead and predict future behavior based on historic data. This can also help you to perform capacity management on your IT systems.
• With centralized asset management, you can automatically discover and manage hardware and software asset information on all servers and workstations monitored.


Images

Checkmk Software - Checkmk Dashboard
Checkmk Software - Netflow Monitoring
Checkmk Software - Kubernetes Monitoring
Checkmk Software - Checkmk provides you with rich details on various metrics Several options to analyze your monitoring data
View 4 more
Checkmk Software - Checkmk Dashboard
Checkmk Software - Netflow Monitoring
Checkmk Software - Kubernetes Monitoring
Checkmk Software - Checkmk provides you with rich details on various metrics Several options to analyze your monitoring data

Not sure about Checkmk? Compare with a popular alternative

Checkmk

4.7 (34)
VS.

Starting Price

US$2,700.00
year
No pricing found

Pricing Options

Free version
Free trial
Free version
Free trial

Features

100
28

Integrations

70
17

Ease of Use

4.2 (34)
4.0 (21)

Value for Money

4.9 (34)
4.6 (21)

Customer Service

4.4 (34)
3.9 (21)
Green rating bars show the winning product based on the average rating and number of reviews.

Alternatives

Icinga

4.5
#1 Alternative to Checkmk
The Icinga 6-in-1 stack covers all aspects of monitoring your entire infrastructure. Get valuable insights and on-time...

PRTG

4.6
#2 Alternative to Checkmk
PRTG monitors your network 24/7 to timely alert you to issues before they become emergencies. Monitor all the systems,...

Zabbix

4.7
#3 Alternative to Checkmk
Zabbix offers great performance for data gathering and can be scaled to very large environments. Distributed monitoring...

Dynatrace

4.5
#4 Alternative to Checkmk
Dynatrace Ruixt is an all-in-one application performance monitoring

Reviews

Overall rating

4.7 /5
(34)
Value for Money
4.9/5
Features
4.7/5
Ease of Use
4.2/5
Customer Support
4.4/5

Already have Checkmk?

Software buyers need your help! Product reviews help the rest of us make great decisions.

Showing 5 reviews of 34
Michael
Michael
Overall rating
  • Industry: Automotive
  • Company size: 10,000+ Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

Best monitoring solution you can find on the market.

Reviewed on 2019/03/08

We deliver in a sequenced order in short interval parts to our customer (JIT/JIS). The IT systems...

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.

Max
Overall rating
  • Industry: Higher Education
  • Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

Check_MK as a single pane of glass

Reviewed on 2020/05/26

Providing infrastructure monitoring to everyone involved in IT provision, whatever their level of...

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.

Alternatives Considered

Icinga

Reasons for Choosing Checkmk

That product had not been maintained much for a long time, and it was clear that it needed replacement. I spent several months looking at a number of products that would fit our budget (hardware: reused; software: zero) and Check_MK was by far the best I saw.

Reasons for Switching to Checkmk

Much easier to configure, and similar or better web monitoring
Verified Reviewer
Overall rating
  • Industry: Consumer Goods
  • Company size: 201–500 Employees
  • Used Daily for 1-5 months
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support
  • Likelihood to recommend 7.0 /10

Best Budget monitoring software, but you get what you pay for

Reviewed on 2019/01/30

It's free, so that's great. You will sink more time into it to get it running as you like compared...

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

Constantin
Overall rating
  • Industry: Hospital & Health Care
  • Company size: 201–500 Employees
  • Used Daily for 1+ year
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

Outstanding Customize, Scale & Performance vs. easy of use

Reviewed on 2020/03/29

We use Check_MK to 24x7 monitor our IT-Infrastructure from bare metal devices, the network, to our...

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.)

Alternatives Considered

PRTG

Reasons for Choosing Checkmk

- The installation & Upgrade process was very complicated. - License Model changing

Reasons for Switching to Checkmk

- More Flexibility - Better scaling with Rulesets
Verified Reviewer
Overall rating
  • Industry: Logistics & Supply Chain
  • Company size: 5,001–10,000 Employees
  • Used Daily for 1-5 months
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10

Excellent product that lacks in documentation and examples

Reviewed on 2019/10/22

Overall the application looks good. Not so much of a learning curve if you’re moving away from...

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.

Alternatives Considered

Zabbix

Reasons for Choosing Checkmk

Nagios couldn’t provide a feature to temporarily acknowledge alarms for a specific amount of time.

Switched From

Nagios Core

Reasons for Switching to Checkmk

Easier to use than Zabbix. Zabbix didn’t have the temporary alarm suppression like check_mk does.
Showing 5 reviews of 34 Read all reviews

Checkmk FAQs

Below are some frequently asked questions for Checkmk.

Checkmk offers the following pricing plans:

  • Starting from: US$2,700.00/year
  • Pricing model: Free Version, Subscription
  • Free Trial: Available

Pricing is per service, i.e. per monitored metric, such as CPU utilization. Raw Edition: free forever Enterprise - Free Edition: limited to monitoring max. 10 hosts. Enterprise - Standard Edition: from €600 per year Enterprise - Managed Services Edition: from €1080 per year

Checkmk has the following typical customers:

Self Employed, 2–10, 11–50, 51–200, 201–500, 501–1,000, 1,001–5,000

Checkmk supports the following languages:

Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish

Checkmk supports the following devices:

Checkmk integrates with the following applications:

AWS Lambda, AlertManager, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EC2, Amazon EC2 Spot, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Azure Active Directory, Azure Application Gateway, Azure Load Balancer, Azure Traffic Manager, Azure Virtual Machines, Cisco Meraki, Couchbase Server, Datadog, Docker, EMC, Entersekt, FreeBSD, Google Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Storage, Grafana, Graylog, IBM Db2, IBM Informix, IBM MQ, InfluxDB, Ivanti Neurons for MDM, JIRA Service Management, Jenkins, Jira, Jira Workflow Steps for Slack, Kubernetes, Libelle BusinessShadow, MQTT Broker, Mailman, Mattermost, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, MySQL, NGINX, OpenShift, PagerDuty, Plesk, PostgreSQL, Prometheus, Prometheus Platform, Proxmox VE, Pushover, SAP Customer Experience, SAP HANA Cloud, SIGNL4, Salesforce B2B Commerce, Salesforce Starter, ServiceNow, Skype, Slack, Sophos Email, Splunk Enterprise, Splunk On-Call, Stormshield Management Center, Unitrends Backup, Workspace ONE, Zerto Virtual Replication, iLert, nTopology

Checkmk offers the following support options:

Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base

Related categories

See all software categories found for Checkmk.