How to Handle Monitoring for Short-Lived Services in Checkmk?

General
1

Hello

I’ve been working on setting up Checkmk to monitor some of my applications, but I ran into an issue with short-lived services. Some of these services spin up for only a few minutes or even seconds, then shut down.

By the time Checkmk runs a check, the service is already gone. This makes it hard to know if the service worked properly or if it failed before disappearing.

Has anyone here dealt with this situation before? I’ve read about using log monitoring or event-based checks, but I’m not sure what the best practice is in Checkmk for handling these short-lived or ephemeral services.

I’d love to learn whether there’s a configuration trick, a plugin, or maybe an external integration that works well for this use case.

I also found this helpful guide on monitoring ephemeral systems that talks about containerized environments, but I’m curious if the same ideas can be applied outside of Kubernetes. Any advice or shared experiences would be great!

Thank you !!

2

Checkmk is not the right tool for such short-lived services.

3

Monitoring short-lived processes can be challenging, and Checkmk isn’t specifically designed for this use case. In such scenarios, we monitor the process age — triggering alerts if a process runs longer than expected, which would be unusual for short-lived tasks.

If the process writes a structured log including start time, end time, and runtime, this can be parsed using mk_logwatch to detect errors or unusually long runtimes. This could significantly enhances monitoring coverage and reliability.