Hi all - thanks for taking the time to read my post. This seems like a very active community!
For background, I recently came across Checkmk while researching various monitoring solutions.
So far, I’ve looked into 20+ tools that all seem to offer similar features—on-prem and cloud infrastructure monitoring, basic log management, APM, and so on.
I’m trying to get a better grasp of how Checkmk stands out from the rest. Is it really a “next-gen” solution worth adopting? If so, what specific environments or use cases make Checkmk the top choice? Is there any functionality Checkmk offers which others don’t?
What is your use case? What do you need to monitor and how much time and expertise do you have?
There is not the one tool for everything. There are many tools which pretend to do so in marketing. I recommend trying to come not from a generic perspective but analyze based on specific questions.
With that being said, there are a few things that we can already say about the things you mentioned:
Log Management: Checkmk offers some Log Monitoring capabilities through Logwatch and the Event Console. But it is not a fully fledged Log Management solution like Graylog, Logstash, others. It does not have the capability to archive, aggregate and analyze logs.
APM: Similar to logs, Checkmk has some Application Monitoring capabilities, and with the addition of RobotMK also some capabilities to monitor / test application performance. But it is not a fully fledged APM tool like Dynatrace or Instana
Now where Checkmk is generally speaking very strong is Server (particularly Linux) and Network Monitoring, particularly in hybrid scenarios, where some stuff lives on prem, and some in the cloud. It is also one of the few tools that can be self-hosted and at the same time is capable of monitoring modern container architectures. It also scales pretty well and is extremely flexible and can be extended (relatively) easily.
For more details, I come back to @martinh 's point: Ask a little more specific question, get a little more specific answer
PS: It’s safe to say that we have the best community, of course
