Agent Rules and the deployment of changes

[iamroot (Heiko)]

Hi there, I’m brand new to Checkmk and although I’ve been reading the manual pretty thoroughly I don’t really understand how the agent bakery and agent specific rules work.

For example:

If I wanted all of my Ubuntu-servers’ upgrade status to be monitored, I would first have to select the rule “APT: Normal and Security Updates” from the agent rules and then bake a new agent, so that it includes the selected “feature/check”, right?!

But after that, do I really need to re-deploy the new agent to all of my hosts?

I mean, this seems to be a little bit of a hassle, especially if - as a beginner - one doesn’t really know, which agent rules are useful.

Or will those changes somehow be automatically send to all of my running agents?

It’s all a little bit confusing… ;-(

[andreas-doehler (Andreas)]

@iamroot

If I wanted all of my Ubuntu-servers’ upgrade status to be monitored, I would first have to select the rule “APT: Normal and Security Updates” from the agent rules and then bake a new agent, so that it includes the selected “feature/check”, right?!

yes

@iamroot

But after that, do I really need to re-deploy the new agent to all of my hosts?

This will happen automatically if you have the hosts registered at your monitoring server.

@iamroot

I mean, this seems to be a little bit of a hassle, especially if - as a beginner - one doesn’t really know, which agent rules are useful.

If i only want to test some rules/settings i would only apply the rules for some test machines and not all.

@iamroot

Or will those changes somehow be automatically send to all of my running agents?

See this article about the automatic updates Automatic agent updates - Distribute agents and plug-ins automatically

[iamroot (Heiko)]

Great, thanks for your quick help!