Over the last years, we have added a lot of functionality to Checkmk. However, with the increase in functionality and flexibility, Checkmk has also become more complex. We want to change this. We are currently rethinking Checkmk’s User Experience to make it simpler and more intuitive.
Your participation in this process is very crucial, because we want to make this a better product for you. Over the next months, we will reach out to you several times to test our ideas in mockups or other formats to help us narrow down the options before we implement changes in the product.
As a starting point, we would need your help with data.
Since Checkmk does not ‘call home’, we have no information on what features and buttons you actually use in Checkmk. You can help us here by answering some of the key questions we have on the use of the Sidebar by answering our (relatively detailed) questionnaire. Filling out the survey will take approximately 15min.
In a few weeks we will also begin prototype testing with test users. If you are interested in being an early tester, please send an email to ux@checkmk.com
Many thanks for your help! For any questions and feedback about this process, please don’t hesitate to leave a reply on this post.
hey,
i operate a fairly big monitoring site with ~2.2k hosts and ~120k services for ~18 IT teams.
I often get asked by my “normal monitoring users” how to configure things or find something in checkmk. Mostly because they are confused by the amount of ways to do such things.
When you work everyday with checkmk, you know your way around. A ux optimization will not make huge impact for checkmk admins.
in my opinion you need to focus on those part time users of checkmk!
i would love to ask my users to take part in the survery, but i am afraid that they wont do it. at least not on there own. there are a lot of questions that a guest or normal user will not understand, cause they never stumbled on some of the features.
nevertheless: a huge thank you for starting this project!
We operate 300 sites and 15.5k hosts globally. From the beginning it was clear to us, that the local IT will be not able to deal with the rule sets and configure their own monitoring. The problem is the fact that most of the Local Admins dont deal on a daily basis with monitoring configuration. Even if training would provided the Admins will not work for a long time on monitoring configuration, forget what they studied and flood central teams with questions.
Our approach is to follow internal hard and software standards and standardize the monitoring accordingly. We provide only the necessary options like the type of host or application to the local administrators. Local IT has no access to the ruleset and just select some tags in the host object to do the configuration.
Beside that we offer specific monitoring for files, services and processes. Local IT need to send a form for this and a central team create the rules for them. Also this process is standardized and managed by change requests.
For any monitoring needed for non standardized, local specific applications the Local IT can write their own local checks. All that needs of course a good but simple internal documentation to help the local Admins to setup their Hosts.
Thanks to checkmk team who made that happen with their tool and with the flexibility they provide to implement customization’s to adapt the tool to our internal, specific needs.
I tried to explain the project in my presentation at checkmk conference in 2018:
Currently we run a project to replace our Central Monitoring, based on Nagios 3 with checkmk.
Thanks for the Insights @mike1098! With enough personal resources your approach best way to go.
Dont get me wrong, i love checkmk and try to contribute where i can.
But i stand by my point: the whole UX is not intuitive for an occasional user or beginner.
we need to ask those users what their pain points are and not us experts.
Actually the goal is to improve the UX for both experts and users. We will show many of the new things at the conference to get an initial opinion from you guys. And then we will spend a lot of time in the weeks after the conference to get further input - also from “standard” users. And voting on visual options instead of questions should be doable for everyone.
We will likely post some more surveys here in the forum then as well. It would then be great, if you could point your users then also here.
From a normal user`s perspective, it would help tremendously to hand out some 2 page “cheat sheets” that admins can give new users.
Something topics like:
“What is a host?”
“What is a service?”
“What magic can your admin do?”
“How To leverage the quick search”
“What is that tactical overview”
“What is a comment, etc”
I know, not all features are used everywhere but some general guidelines would help a lot!