Node Exporter Checkmk style in Grafana PoC

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This have been something I have wanted to do for a very long time. I have used the InfluxDB exporter for years and it have been super useful to quickly run a PromQL query against Checkmk data or create visual appealing dashboards of Checkmk metrics.

Let’s face it dashboards in Checkmk are boring (but useful) :slight_smile:

Here is a multi-host node exporter that can be used as inspiration. It used two custom labels but you don’t have to use them. The last one is host_name that comes out of the box.

AI was used to get this done as it would been almost impossible to find all metrics used in node-exporter (prometheus style metrics) and convert that to Checkmk format used by Influxdb.

However this works great and I use it every day. Our hosts in Checkmk gets labels from our CMDB that makes this super powerful. I can see hosts in a specific datacenter, for a specific application really easy.

There are of course many other ways this can be done but for those who knows PromQL this is much more powerful than for instance the Checkmk datasource imho - or creating the same dashboards in Checkmk.

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Hello Anders

I came across this thread, and one sentence in particular caught my attention: “dashboards in Checkmk are boring (but useful)”. I work on dashboards and graphs at Checkmk, and that is exactly the kind of honest feedback I want to understand properly.

When you say “boring”, what do you mean exactly? Is it more about:

  • the visual appeareance
  • the overall styling (colours, density, general polish)
  • the level of interactivity
  • the flexibility of the dashboard
  • or the amount of effort it takes to build something that looks good

Or is it something else entirely?

I’m also curious about the comparison with Grafana. What are you building there that you wish you could build directly in Checkmk? Are there specific workflows, visualizations, or interactions that you feel are missing?

Best,

Mathieu

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