Introducing docs.checkmk.com

Dear Checkmk community,

the documentation is one of the most crucial parts of Checkmk for getting started, but also for Checkmk veterans. In the last years, we have worked heavily on adding new articles and describing all key concepts and features.

Now we are introducing the documentation in a completely new design to make it easier for you to use it. Today, we launched it on https://docs.checkmk.com

The new documentation comes with an improved navigation for the overall content, but also better navigation within the articles.
The documentation is now also versioned. This becomes especially important with the changes coming in the UI of Checkmk 2.0. On default, you will end up at the latest stable version, which is currently the 1.6.0. You can select in the version drop-down another version or the master, which is our workbench to see the latest drafts as well.
We will add some further features in the near future, e.g. a properly working search.

The documentation is now also hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/tribe29/checkmk-docs
While we have migrated the content, we haven’t switched our processes yet. We are still working in our own private git repository in our proprietary mark-up language for compatibility reasons. Our plan is to change this in the near future as well, but the entire docs team is busy with writing documentation for Checkmk 2.0 at the moment.
In the near future, this will allow you to create Issues to give feedback, but also allow you to contribute to the Checkmk documentation with Pull requests.

Shout-outs go especially to Marcel (the mastermind) and Baris (the magician, a.k.a web dev), and to the entire knowledge team: Thomas (the new full time writer), Sebastian (the “new” consultant writing part-time, Mathias, Mirco (the freelance writer from tutonaut.de) and Anthony (the translator).

Please share your experiences and ideas around it and thanks for everyone who helped testing it in advance! We will do our best to build a great documentation around Checkmk.

Martin from the Checkmk team

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[quote=“martin.hirschvogel, post:1, topic:21746”]
… Please share your experiences and ideas around it and thanks for everyone who helped testing it in advance! …[/quote]

Thanks for the hard work. Very exciting that the docs are on github, allowing for pull requests with improvements (such as an occasional typo or wording here and there). Also great to see the names of those working hard on these efforts.

Recognizing this is a work in progress, glad to hear search is on the horizon. Are there plans to allow “minimizing the side-panels”, such as the “On this page” on the right or the documentation index on the left (or did I miss a button)?

ty again :smile:

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Because @martin.hirschvogel forgot to thank himself, allow me. Thank you Martin, you have been working tirelessly on it as well. Coordinating everything, bug fixing and of course testing it with our customers and community members.

As Martin said, please share your feedback so we can keep improving your experience.

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Great work!! :+1:

Just a minor topic (hopefully) related to different browsers: when using Firefox I have an overlay effect at the agenda (despite refresh etc.); in Chrome it’s fine though…

Hi brm,did you visit docs.checkmk during testing? Could you do a Ctrl+F5 (or Ctrl+Shift+R) and let me know if the problem persists in Firefox.

Thanks - working now!

Hi fgfdaoisc,

if the side-panels were collapsible, what would you expect? Would you like the text in the center to become wider? Or do you just want to collapse them, because they distract you?

I am just trying to get understand the “why” here.

Thank you for your feedback.

First of all: The new documentation page looks awesome!

Three improvements:

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Great ideas.
GitHub links we will add once we start working ourselves in the GitHub repo. Until then, we don’t want to raise false expectations as we won’t be able to merge pull requests (reason stated above). So, just a question of time.
Regarding translations: We have already workflows in place to keep things up-to-date in both languages. But we will evaluate that early next year again, and Weblate will definitely be considered.

The bugs I have added to our list of things to fix. :slight_smile:

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Hi,
nice to see the new shiny docs. :slight_smile:
Some colleagues have already asked me how they can search there.
Especially for new colleagues it’s still hard to find information if they don’t know exactly what they are looking for.

Will there be a search built in?

Thanks and many greetings
Tim

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Yes, in the first months of 2021, if all goes according to plan

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Hi Martin,

that’s really great work, but I have a question right away.
I can’t find anything about the reports here. Will you post something or will the topic be dropped in the future?

Thanks and greetings,
Uwe

The reports are here i think https://docs.checkmk.com/latest/en/reporting.html

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Thanx for the information :slight_smile:
That’s exactly the content of my printed 700-page manual.
The background to my question is that reporting is becoming more and more important for us because our customers expect detailed monthly reports on the monitored systems.

Hi @martin.hirschvogel,
The MySQL docs miss the * in the configuration of the monitoring account at


The lines should read like GRANT SELECT, SHOW DATABASES ON *.* TO 'checkmk'@'localhost';.

Please check that the templating / formatting on docs.checkmk.com does not remove important pieces of code.

Hi,
Really great job !
I just regret that it is WATO centric, which is not really suitable for huge config like ours (4500 hosts, 140k services).
Is it planned to add doc about the textual config files ?
Thanks

Hi,
looks good, but did not work on all browser like Safari.
Cheers,
Christian

Hi Christian,

What exactly does not work in Safari and which version of Safari are you using. I just checked docs.checkmk.com in Safari 13.1 and everything looks normal.

Perhaps a “hard refresh” does the trick in Safari as well. For this you would have to press down and hold the command key and click the refresh button.

Hi Robert,

and we thought we finally got the last asterisk in check. Thank you for reporting this. We will take care of it.

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Thanks you for reporting the bug.
In order for me to replicate the issue, can I ask which OS and version of Firefox you are using?

1 Like