CMK version: CRE 2.4.0p8
OS version: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Before switching to Checkmk, we have used nagios (later icinga classic) for monitoring and cacti for graphing. I liked the fact that Checkmk combines monitoring and graphing and thus eliminates the need to run two different applications for that, finally using the (already existing) performance data of checks for the graphs.
However, the graphing in Checkmk can be… suboptimal at times. One thing I miss about the old setup this:
A big advantage of cacti (and also netdata) is the fact that you can see all graphs of a host on a single page, allowing you to see correlations between different services/checks/graphs more easily (e.g. “oh, at 13:17, there was a big spike in CPU usage, but at the same time, apache has a spike in requests per second”).
Sometimes I wish I had a way to display all graphs of a host one below the other for this reason and thus was wondering, is there a way to get that?
I couldn’t find such a view in Checkmk, so I’ve tried with grafana, but I couldn’t find a way to dynamically display all graphs for a host. I managed to make a dashboard with the most common service graphs, e.g. CPU, RAM, disk IO, apache, mysql etc., and the hostname as a variable so that it’s selectable in a dropdown. However if a host has other services, e.g. nginx instead of apache, this method will fail because it’s not dynamic (enough).
I also thought I could just write some php that loops through the xml and rrd files in the var/pnp4nagios/perfdata/$hostname folders and just paint the graphs using the rrdtool library, but I couldn’t find all the necessary information there (e.g. in an XML, which datasources are combined in a single graph, colors, line vs area, units, negative Y axis and so on).
Or did I completely miss something and there is a built-in way to get such a view? Or has someone found a way to hack something together that solves this?
