Hello, I am looking for a replacement of solarwinds at my job as I really dislike their product and its becoming too many moving parts and unreliable sometimes, I feel like I am always monitoring the monitoring system which is not good.
I am currently running the enterprise trial and if we go this route, we would pay for enterprise support.
That being said, I watched a bunch of their YouTube videos which are very well done, I browsed through their docs which is also written well but I am still finding it a bit complicated. I have no issue with spending more time learning and reading but before going down that road, I wanted ask if checkmk is capable a few main features.
Automatically find new hosts (Windows Servers via Agent and Network Gear via SNMP) and add them (I will deploy the MSI via GPO to the Windows Servers). I cannot get this working for some reason, I see the bulk discovery but I think this is for services, I see the scan feature in the folder but that doesnât find anything, I am a bit stumped on this one and I am not sure if it possible out of the box or does it need something custom or an import from CSV is my only option.
Sending alerts to different groups of device owners, I believe this possible by folders, so if we have separate folders for letâs say Infrastructure, Database and Networking folders, we can send alerts to the proper people who managed the devices
Remote site monitoring, I watched their videos on âdistributed monitoringâ and it looks to be possible to deploy another appliance in the secondary site and have it a send data back from the main one which looks great.
Monitor simple things:
Disk thresholds, if disk is a certain % over and certain GB free
CPU utilization, if its 90% for x number of mins
Memory utilization, its if 95% for x number of mins
I try to answer your questions as good as possible
1 - there is no integrated network discovery inside CMK, one route you can go is a small script what checks your network for open agent port and then uses the CMK API to add found hosts to the system. But pay attention here inside CMK you can have the same IP multiple times. The sole identifier is the name of the host. That means, if you do a network discovery you need to have a working DNS for all the IPs.
2 - For grouping of alerts you have multiple possibilities. It is possible the way you mentioned. You can assign contact groups to host or service objects with many different rules. Or in the end you can generate notifications completely independent inside the notification system only with regex for host and service names.
3 - If you want to use distributed monitoring you only need as a minimum the direction from the central system to your worker/slave systems.
4 - Thatâs the core business of CMK
Hallo,
an remark for topic number.
Maybe it is a opportunity to optimize your life cycle management of systems. We are using automatic setups with terraform and ansible.
Depending on your network infrastructure the network scan may fail because of firewalls, routings etcâŚ
Ralf
Automatically find new hosts (Windows Servers via Agent and Network Gear via SNMP) and add them (I will deploy the MSI via GPO to the Windows Servers). I cannot get this working for some reason, I see the bulk discovery but I think this is for services, I see the scan feature in the folder but that doesnât find anything, I am a bit stumped on this one and I am not sure if it possible out of the box or does it need something custom or an import from CSV is my only option.
After this you get a custom MSI, which you can install in your Windows servers and they automatically register themselves on the Checkmk servers. I will send you a video which is in draft and shows this per PM.
You came to the right place if youâre looking for a Solarwinds replacement
Well, at least for their monitoring products. They obviously have a ton of other things that we donât do, but that may be part of the problem, if I understand you correctly.
If you are seriously considering going down the Checkmk Enterprise route, I can only encourage you to reach out to any of our partners (or to us directly). I donât know where you are located, but we have extremely knowledgeable partners in many countries (like community hero @andreas-doehler, who already answered your questions) who I am sure would be happy to answer your questions as part of their pre-sales engineering.
Checkmk, for all its merits, is a complex beast. Working with someone like Andreas will give you a better chance at âfirst time rightâ.
With all the advertising out of the way, I wanted to chime in on question #3:
The biggest benefit of the distributed monitoring âCheckmk-styleâ is not that the remote site sends back data. Thatâs nice, for sure. But what is particularly useful, especially once you scale this to more than maybe 2 or 3 sites, is that you can do a centralized configuration, that is then pushed out to the remote sites. So instead of needing to set up every site one by one, you can push the config out to âanyâ (there are limits) number of sites. Hereâs the docs section about this: Distributed monitoring - Scaling and distributing Checkmk
Please donât. It looks like you aim for automaton (GPO MSI for example) but your hosts should really be in a CMDB or at least IPAM so you can add them once and there control if they should be added to Checkmk.
Using GPO for MSI installs wonât work as you would need to perform a TLS registration and that is not included in the agent. To automate this SCCM is a much better option, even Ansible would work on Windows to perform the tasks. Installing the agent does not require any reboot.
In checkmk you normally can create two different kind of âpermissionsâ. One is the contact group where you add hosts and/or services who should be able to see the above. This can be AD Security Groups
Then other is the permissions, and this applies to all contact groups. You cant make user A âadminâ for some hosts and âread onlyâ for others.
Notifications are normally assigned to people who are contacts to hosts and/or services. So you need to be careful here if someone wants to have access to some WATO folders but donât want notifications.
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