Checkmk

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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 envisagées 

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Avantages

Lots of features and customization, very affordable

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

- 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 envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Checkmk 

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Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Checkmk 

Pourquoi passer à Checkmk

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

Users with little experience are often overwhelmed, and error messages can be misleading without deeper analysis.

Avantages

Ease of use and the possibility to monitor everything

Inconvénients

How you have to configure the notifications

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Sehr mächtige Möglichkeiten der Konfiguration.
Tolles Monitoring, dass keine Wünsche offen lässt.

Inconvénients

Es wirkt in der Oberfläche ein wenig "Old fashioned", was aber der Funktionalität nicht schadet.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

Actually there is nothing that I can recall.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

BI to difficult to configure, make it easy with assistants

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

"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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

There are too many options to configure Check_MK.

Avantages

- 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

Inconvénients

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

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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)

Avantages

Scalability & the sheer amount of check plugins already shipped!

Inconvénients

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

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Checkmk 

Pourquoi passer à Checkmk

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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