The pace of change in IT continues to accelerate. At Checkmk, we believe the solution for all the upcoming challenges in IT monitoring is an open observability ecosystem: built on an involved user community, reliable partners, many off-the-shelf integrations, and a wide range of APIs for development, configuration and operations. Join us to learn about the latest release of our open source monitoring solution Checkmk Raw. Among the highlights are our completely reworked Grafana integration, performance boost for the InfluxDB integration, 150+ new or improved checks including Google Cloud Platform, Mobile Devices Monitoring, Cisco Meraki. Furthermore, we have news about sharing monitoring customizations, an extended REST API, and an enhanced user experience. What makes Checkmk 2.2 truly unique is our community-driven approach. We have harnessed the expertise of numerous individuals to build a monitoring solution that caters to universal needs. In our talk, we will demonstrate the power of collaboration and how it has shaped our platform. We will also showcase how the Checkmk open-source ecosystem thrives, highlighting some new interesting projects.

1. checkmk.com
Newest developments in Checkmk Raw
Open Source Monitoring Conference 2023

2. Open source monitoring since 2004 (Nagios)
Start of Checkmk development
First employee at Mathias Kettner GmbH
Linux training, consulting and software development
Maintainer of NagVis
https://github.com/nagvis
2
Lars Michelsen
Checkmk GmbH
Head of Development

3. Focus: our open source solution & community
Raw Edition
Free & open source IT monitoring for
small- and mid-sized infrastructures.
Monitor your entire IT:
⬡ Auto-discover your IT
⬡ Monitor out-of-the-box with
2000+ plug-ins
⬡ Auto-detect issues
and more
Support:
Checkmk Community
Enterprise Edition
Scalable and automated enterprise-wide
IT monitoring.
Everything in Raw, plus:
⬡ Speed up your monitoring
⬡ Scale up your monitoring
⬡ Automate your monitoring
⬡ Monitor dynamic workloads
⬡ Visualize your IT
and much more
Support:
Enterprise-grade
Cloud Edition
State-of-the-art IT monitoring for cloud
and hybrid infrastructures.
Everything in Enterprise, plus:
⬡ Monitor cloud workloads
⬡ Deploy from cloud marketplaces
⬡ Auto-register any load
⬡ Push and pull agents
⬡ Visualize your cloud
and much more
Support:
Enterprise-grade
3

4. 01 What’s new in Checkmk Raw (since our last talk at OSMC)
02 About the Checkmk ecosystem
03 Behind the scenes
04 What’s next for Checkmk
4
Agenda

5. A new user interface
5

6. 6
Checkmk Raw now also with nice graphing!

7. 7
New agent architecture with TLS encryption
Plain text by default
⬡ No encryption, obviously…
Agent encryption (AES)
⬡ Has to be activated and
deployed
⬡ No authentication
SSH (Custom datasource)
⬡ Complicated setup
Before
TLS activated by default
⬡ Encryption and authentication
Done by Checkmk agent controller
⬡ Included in Linux .deb, .rpm
and Windows .msi agent
packages
Since Checkmk 2.1

8. 8
Mature REST-API for configuration and operation
Monitoring
SLA
Acknowledgements
Comments
Downtimes
Event Console
Host status
Metrics
Service status
Setup
Agents
Activate changes
Auxiliary tags
Business Intelligence
Contact groups
Folders
Hosts
Host groups
Host tag groups
Setup
Password store
Rules
Rule sets
Service discovery
Service groups
Site Mgmt
Time periods
Users
User roles
Largely covered by Web API
REST API
Only partially covered by Web API

9. 9
Development APIs for check plug-ins

10. 10
More recent changes in
Checkmk Raw 2.2 (May ‘23)

11. 11
Create complex label filters
in views and dashboards

12. Visible improvements
⬢ Stability & Performance
⬡ More efficient API calls
⬢ Quality of Life improvements
⬡ Simplified interface
⬡ Raw and Enterprise more similar
⬡ More explicit errors, if too many results are
found
⬡ Graphs colors same as in CMK
12
Internal improvements
⬢ Update to newest Grafana API
⬢ Higher long-term software quality
⬡ CI for building releases
⬡ End-to-End tests for core features
⬡ More unit tests
⬡ Typescript type safety
⬢ License changed to Apache-2.0
Introducing Grafana integration 3.0.0
For Checkmk >= 2.1.0 and Grafana >= 8.0
https://github.com/Checkmk/grafana-checkmk-datasource

13. Variable support is finally available with 3.1
13
GitHub project with pull
requests and issues

14. 14

15. User Experience
- Do/click the right things
- Simpler configuration
- Better error messages
- Make things readable
- Only show relevant information
15
And many more improvements…
Visualization: more flexibility in views
- Macros
- RegEx matching
- Combining tables
‘Freeze mode’ for Business Intelligence
Performance
- Caching & optimized file formats
- Loading of filters
- Service discovery
- Activate changes
- Rules & searches
- Notification processing
- Event Console
- Distributed monitoring
Check plug-ins
- 30+ new check plug-ins (incl. Google Cloud monitoring)
- 40+ checks supporting further systems
- 80+ checks with additions to metrics, rulesets
Password store for all special agents
Steps towards unified agent behaviour for Linux, Solaris, AIX,
FreeBSD, OpenWrt, Windows
Reworked extension packages mechanisms Pre-flight check before Checkmk updates
Improved service discovery
MS Teams integration

16. 16
About the Checkmk
ecosystem

17. 17
The Checkmk Community
User forum
>6.000 users
>10,000 daily visits
Translations
6 languages
Integration exchange
540+ packages
GitHub
>180 contributors

18. 18
Checkmk Ansible Collection
Agent
⬢ Initial installation
⬢ Registrations
⬢ Supports all relevant
Linux distributions
Server
⬢ Initial installation
⬢ Site management
⬢ Site updates
⬢ Supports all relevant
Linux distributions
https://github.com/Checkmk/grafana-checkmk-datasource

19. 19
CMDB Syncer
Rule-based and modular system to synchronize hosts into and between Checkmk, Netbox and
other systems.
Main goal is the complete organization of hosts based on CMDB systems
https://github.com/kuhn-ruess/cmdbsyncer | https://cmdbsyncer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

20. 20
Automatic Label Discovery
https://github.com/automation-monitoring/labelpicker | https://labelpicker.mk/
Vmware Tags for a VM
Checkmk Label:

21. 21
Behind the scenes

22. Checkmk — About us
150+ employees
Based in Munich, Germany, and Atlanta, USA
Focusing on IT monitoring for 15+ years
Open-source enthusiasts
# Commercial customers
22

23. 23
Our tech organization has grown a lot
9
13
20
28
38
59
75

24. 24
What’s next for Checkmk

25. 25
Our product focus
Infrastructure
Applications
Monitor applications from the user perspective.
Synthetic monitoring
The best solution for monitoring hybrid IT.
For system administrators / DevOps.
Broad coverage out-of-the-box for all technologies.

26. 26
“Synthetic” monitoring
“Synthetically” mimic interactions of users with target systems to
verify applications work as expected

27. 27
Robotmk
Example:
Carl Zeiss AG

28. 28
Robotmk
Example: Carl Zeiss AG

29. 29
The plan for Checkmk 2.3
More monitoring
Improve
core features
More
developer APIs
SaaS Product
(2024)
Synthetic
Monitoring
Configuration
Visualization
User Experience
Performance

30. Questions?
Thank you!
30
More about Checkmk:
https://checkmk.com
Contact:
⬢ Email: lm (at) checkmk.com
⬢ X: @LarsMichelsen
⬢ GitHub: https://github.com/LarsMichelsen