Monitor via hostname instead of IP

General
1

Good morning CheckMK Community,

I wanted to see if it was possible to monitor a host in our environment using the hostname instead of ip address.

The main reasoning behind this is - since one of our departments relies on DHCP to assign the machine an ip address, it could potentially change from time to time. I know long term I’ll eventually get them to dhcp reserved, but figured to reach out to see if anyone has a setup that works for this or has a possible working solution to use for the configuration.

As always any help is always greatly appreciated!

Best Regards,

Justin

2

You can put the hostname into the IP address field. Then every time the agent is queried or an active check runs DNS will be used to resolve it.

3 Likes
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As always thank you @r.sander for the very helpful recommendation. Just threw in the hostname and worked like a charm!

Hope you have a great day.

1 Like
4

In general, you might want to turn on the inline help to discover such “hidden features”.
For the IP (v4|v6) address field, it says:

[…] If you enter a DNS name here, the DNS resolution will be carried out each time the host is checked. Check_MKs DNS cache will NOT be queried. Use this only for hosts with dynamic IP addresses.

3 Likes
7

That’s a good catch, where is that located under WATO?

Since these hosts will at some point have a new address I would imagine that the updated one would carry over to CheckMK as i’m now monitoring the hostname instead of IP, is that not the case?

8

The inline help in WATO can be found here:
image

if you are on 1.6 or below, there is a little icon of a book (or stack of books) at the very top right corner of the checkmk WEB-UI

2 Likes
9

Yes, you should be good. That’s exactly the point of that feature, just as r.sander explained.
I just wanted to point out how to find out such not-too-obvious features :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
10

Perfect, honestly you saved my bacon, did not realize there was a feature that does this for me automatically.

Thank you @martin.schwarz for the assist as well!

11

This reminds me of the story (not sure if it’s an urban myth) of Microsoft doing a customer survey of what features people would like to have in one of their office products (I believe it was Word).

Turns out that more than 90% of what people mentioned already existed. It was just well hidden :grin: Checkmk can be like that as well, sometimes.

1 Like
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