Checkmk 2.5 is out!

Announcements
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Hello Community,

Checkmk 2.5 is officially released. Thank you to everyone who joined the community calls, tested the beta, reported bugs, and shared feedback along the way.

A short overview of what’s new:

  • A more intuitive UI — global search across Setup and Monitoring, clearer error messages, and guided workflows for longer operations like baking agents or adding hosts
  • Rebuilt dashboards — responsive layouts in the commercial editions, a widget preview before saving, and shareable links for people outside Checkmk
  • OpenTelemetry support (Cloud and Ultimate) — push metrics via OTLP or scrape Prometheus endpoints, and correlate application and infrastructure data in one place
  • Improved virtualization and cloud monitoring — a completely reworked Azure integration, expanded Proxmox coverage, new checks for Hyper-V and native Podman support
  • Checkmk Relay (Cloud and Ultimate) — a lightweight container for monitoring remote or segmented networks without a full remote site
  • “Explain with AI” (Cloud) — one-click plain-language explanations of alerts

Check out more about Checkmk 2.5 in the blog, release notes and full list of Werks.

Join us at Checkmk Conference #12 (June 16 - 18) to dive into Checkmk 2.5.0 and discover what’s next for Checkmk.

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You can also go to play.checkmk.com to see how it looks like.
The ‘Setup’ area is deactivated - but we added a couple of dashboards under ‘Applications’ in ‘Monitor’ called ‘Astronomy shop: …’. They showcase the new Open Telemetry integration utilizing our new metric backend.

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I saw the Astronomy Shop at Kubecon this year – assuming it’s the same demo environment?! :slight_smile: Awesome for testing OTEL things! :+1:

It would have been great to see Checkmk at Kubecon too :sweat_smile:

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OrbVis is shown in the play environment, but the name is not mentioned in docs or werks.

Is this still NagVis, but renamed?

Or is it brand-new and integrated with Checkmk now?

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After some tests it looks and feels not like NagVis :smiley:
What is good in this case.

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Yes. It’s the same. Running a Kubernetes cluster.
I gave now all ‘guest’ users the permission to create custom graphs. With that you can access the backend and see how this works.

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To be revealed…

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Is there already a proven procedure how to upgrade from checkmk 2.4 to 2.5 when having it installed as docker container?

My pretty basic docker-compose.yml for my homelab installation looks like:

services:
  checkmk:
    image: "checkmk/check-mk-raw:2.4.0-latest"
    container_name: "checkmk"
    environment:
      - CMK_PASSWORD=<PW>
      - TZ=Europe/Berlin
    volumes:
      - checkmk:/omd/sites
    tmpfs:
      - /opt/omd/sites/cmk/tmp:uid=1000,gid=1000
    ports:
      - 8082:5000
      - 8003:8000
    restart: always

volumes:
  checkmk:

Is it enough to change the referenced docker image?

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I was able to figure it out myself and verify that it works:

image: “checkmk/check-mk-community:2.5.0-latest”
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See:
https://forum.checkmk.com/t/orbvis-a-nagvis-successor-candidate-developer-preview-feedback-welcome/59010/2

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Is it intended that the download page still displays checkmk 2.5 as beta?

See:
https://download.checkmk.com/stable_downloads.json

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Hey Florian,
we don’t utilize this ourselves anymore, so we didn’t take a look at that file. Should be updated soon.

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Hello!
I have a small…visual error on the page, doesn’t really affect anything, but looks weird:

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Where the “Host” and such buttons are, it overlays the Title of the current page.

I have tried this with our two mainly used resolutions (and with FF and Chrome), happens on both :smiley:

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Looks like this is fixed now :slight_smile:

Is there a better/new source for update data?

Cheers
Thomas

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Yeah, I fixed it. I asked the team to include it in their release process.

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Hi Martin

I am trying to get something going with otel and I am really struggling, is there anyway you could show some example configurations for the metric backend rules?

If I have a bunch of devices with exporters sending me data, when I create metric backend rule, how does it associate with a device in checkmk? does there need to be a hostname metric coming through that matches the host in checkmk?

cheers

Garth

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In the beginning the received data just runs into the Clickhouse database. Then you have to decide whether to use the data to generate hosts and services via DCD or pick a bunch of metrics via special agent rules and attach them as services to a host:

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Hey Garth,

  1. I typically start with a ‘Customize’ → ‘Custom graphs’ → ‘Add graph’
    Then I select ‘Graph lines Open Telemetry’ to see what metrics I get and how it looks like:

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    Then I start playing around a bit with the filters and titles.
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    If I have what I need for alerting, I use the small icon next to the delete icon
    image to create a rule which creates a service.

  2. I only go down the DCD route Mattias mentioned to get RED metrics. But that is typically only possible, if the service is instrumented via OpenTelemetry

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Ok I am getting somewhere now, the problem was my F5s were not sending hostname through properly, but we were able to set a custom attribute in their exporter config. Now thats coming through so I can filter between them.

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the special agent rule

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I get a service discovered :slight_smile:

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Edit: but when I add a second rule, nothing happens. If I disable the first rule, the second one starts working

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