I’ve been mostly lurking here over the past few years. Signed up last month because I recently replaced Zabbix with CheckMK RAW, and I’ve been really impressed so far!
With Zabbix, I got a bit carried away customizing the main dashboard with tons of graphs—but with CheckMK, the focus feels different. You get actionable insights right away, at a glance, without having to sift through noise.
The depth is still there, maybe even more so. Streamlined enough for quick checks, but powerful enough to dig into the nitty-gritty when necessary.
I’ve started using it not just for my network gear, but also to monitor remote servers. I’m still adding them slowly.
Posting a photo of my rack with CheckMK running. I hope this is the right place to share it! The goal is to have everything in the rack monitored and setup up alerting. I’ll probably be posting questions here if/when I get stuck in that process.
congrats for this clean rack installation (and truly for using CMK)!
May I ask what the third unit from top (the one connecting to the topmost switch and the panel) is and does, as well as the bottom 2 units?
For the “third from top” I think it could be a firewall appliance, second from bottom maybe a ups (APC or similar), but what’s the bottom one?
And, if possible at all, I’d like to see the monitoring of the keyboard (because you mentioned to finally monitor everything in the rack)
You are spot on! The third unit is my pfSense firewall with dual WAN failover: red cable connects to ISP1, and gray cable to ISP2. pfSense as you probably know, blocks all unsolicited inbound traffic by default and includes custom LAN segmentation and traffic filtering.
On pfSense I’ve also installed Suricata for traffic IDS/IPS, with pfBlockerNG in front for dropping noise, scanners, etc. The extra layers are mainly for insight, as default is already secure.
2nd from the bottom is a CyberPower OR500LCDRM1U Smart App UPS. (note: in hindsight, I wish I had spent a bit more 5 years ago and gotten the 1500va instead. Don’t make my mistake. That said, in the 5 years, I had to replace the battery only once, last year.
The bottom unit is a power strip with LED switches (ADJ PC100A) which is covered by a tinted plexiglass 1u cover that was difficult to find, (try searching for Middle Atlantic 1u Security Rack Panel). I got mine used on eBay.
Haha! You caught me! Keyboard telemetry coming soon! Gotta make sure those keystrokes stay within SLA.
P.S. I’m working on a review of Checkmk RAW, just still in the process of learning the settings and adding hosts, etc.
That said, in the 5 years, I had to replace the battery only once, last year.