Documentation Questions

OK so I am a few weeks into CheckMK now and if I’m being totally honest I have no idea how I even functioned before discovering this.

I am currently looking through documentation but have somewhat specific questions now, and am hoping to get some guidance on where this is detailed (I have NO issues reading, I’m just having issues finding where some stuff is documented)

Currently my sites are using Nagios, and nrpe on my client systems (Which looks like is ‘mrpe’ in CheckMK) I am trying to figure out if mrpe is a standalone agent, or part of the checkmk-agent package I already have deployed, and then (in either case) a configuration guide so I can begin trying to migrate some simple checks that are in nrpe now and testing with mrpe…

Some of the reading I have done indicates I can simply continue using nrpe, and the configured checks, but I don’t know if there are pitfalls to that approach, or good reasons ‘not’ to do it… (So if there is a best practices guide that would be awesome, or a guide on migrating from Nagios to CheckMK even better) - Note I have found some guidance on migrating with google, but the pitfall with a simple google as a novice is knowing if the article you are reading is accurate or not… So again just some guidance on trusted documentation!

Last would be UI optimization, as I add hosts to my deployment the “main dashboard” will only continue to get more cluttered… I assume I am doing something wrong, so any documentation on how to organize the dashboard as devices are added would be fantastic.

Again, and I cannot stress this enough, I am not expecting people to give me answers, I have no issues reading, so if you want to just point me to articles that cover the stuff I am trying to do (Or other common issues that beginners run into) I am happy to do the reading!

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I am part of the docs team and always grateful for unfiltered input. Yet I have to point to some “but” conditions: For example, the Official Checkmk User Guide does not cover best practises. We try to use the blog for such stuff. Personally – from the doc writers perspective – I think the blog should move to 40/60 (marketing/best practise content). I assume, team marketing does not agree. :wink:

Such a migration guide would provide a great blog article, so make notes and contact me, when the migration is done.

Let’s start with details: MRPE is primarily for migration, its second use is end-to-end monitoring. It is already part of the agent, so you can start copying or soft linking present NRPE scripts to the MRPE directories. Just do it, it’ll work. And it’ll work no worse than on Nagios.

However remember, when end-to-end monitoring is not the scope and a service on the same host is to be monitored, you might rewrite these scripts some day as local check plugins. Performance is the same, but debugging is much easier.

Or for monitoring backups you might want to make your scripts just dump local check formatted output to the spool directory. Asyncronically run scripts that dump their output can greatly improve performance.

In the long term, for end-to-end monitoring you might consider using piggyback data. Again, performance wise, this is not a big difference, but I find it much easier to debug and to automate than MRPE for end-to-end.

Regarding the UI: I love using folders, not only because you can apply same rules to all hosts from a folder, but also because you can switch easily to an overview table of the state of all contained hosts.

Of course you can click your own dashboards. At least I am out at dashboards: I configure all my monitoring in way that notifications provide me with relevant infos and directly then click to the hosts that do not behave as they should do. If you are clicking Dashboards you can finally set your coolest dashboard as start page.

If you run into issues, do not hesitate to ask!

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Hi Michael,

welcome to the forum! And thanks for the flowers in your opening paragraph.

As you will see, people will be very helpful here, especially if you approach them as respectfully as you have done in this post. :+1:

As to your questions:
Read Chapter 12.1 of the docs, that will give you a good idea about the benefits of migrating from Nagios to the CMC. Here’s the link: The Checkmk Micro Core (CMC)

As a rule of thumb, as you suspected, things that work in Nagios, will also work in Checkmk. However, in many cases, there is not really a good reason not to use the Checkmk stuff. Read more here: Monitoring Linux - The new agent for Linux in detail

Last, but not least, here’s an article from our own blog about how to migrate from Nagios to Checkmk: A simple migration from Nagios to Checkmk | Checkmk

Happy Monitoring!

EDIT: @mschlenker was faster and already provided a bunch of info, but NOT the migration blog article :wink:

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This blog article is more marketing/sales stuff (“Look how easy it is!”). :upside_down_face: I’d really love to write an in-depth coverage of technical details as follow-up. Something that starts with the easy stuff (copying NRPE plugins to MRPE) and ends with the harder stuff like identifying inefficient plugins and migrating them to native Checkmk mechanisms.

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Be my guest, Mathias :slight_smile:

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We’ll discuss details in the internal Slack. :grin:

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This is fantastic! Thank you very much! Going to read through this then I am sure come back with some questions, but assuming I do have more specific questions I will post them in their own thread(s) so solutions can be easily found by future “Mikes”.

Hopefully everyone has a fantastic day ahead (or behind depending on your timezone) :slight_smile:

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The time zone comment is quite funny if you consider this: Elias moved to Atlanta to establish our US headquarter, I am in Germany, so it currently does not happen often that we communicate synchronously.

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I get it, I am in the US, but most of my team is in the UK (And incidentally I went to Highschool in Germany, I loved it when I was there!)

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