I’ve evaluating checkmk as a replacement for PRTG and I’d like some feedback on how checkmk handles our existing pain points. I have a test environment set up but some of these questions require a full system under load or I think a decent amount of experience to answer.
The PRTG API is very slow. Getting a years worth of data for one port on one switch times out and fails. We’re on a physical server with raid 1 drives, 28 CPUs, and 128GB of ram to give PRTG all the chance we can, and the API is still unusable. Just getting the last 1 day of data for a single port takes 3-4 seconds, making dashboards take longer to refresh than a sensible refresh rate.
It’s not possible to Acknowledge alarms semi-permanently. We take devices down for months at a time. If I acknowledge the alarms, they become unacknowledged when PRTG reboots (And it has to reboot weekly otherwise it stops functioning after 2-3 weeks). The only option is to pause them and hope I remember in two months to re-enable the correct sensors.
Multiple SNMP tables cannot be cross referenced. Some of our devices have related information in different SNMP tables. There is no way to tie them together in PRTG. Specifically for a multicast video monitor, one table contains just the index and the stream name, while another table contains the stream stats by index. So PRTG would let me pull in the names and the stats, but I couldn’t tie them together to see that Stream foo had some specific errors, just that stream 42 had the errors.
I am biased. But 1 and 2 are standard business.
3. Difficult to answer because very plug-in specific. We don’t do the MIB import thingy PRTG does, because it basically hits limits everywhere, when you try to actually use in practice for anything which is not super basic. I’d say writing your own SNMP checks is actually straight forward and you can leverage the entire SNMP engine of Checkmk that way.
If you are evaluating Checkmk Raw as a replacement for PRTG, this forum is a great place to start.
Should you consider one of the commercial editions of Checkmk, I am sure that one of our partners or we (Checkmk) would also be happy to walk you through Checkmk in more detail and answer any questions you might have.
For 1 & 2 i would say it like @martin.hirschvogel, it’s not a problem with CMK
Here this check is a good example how different tables are combined inside a CMK check.
From line 247 you see two tables are fetched. These two are than later combined inside the check.
The complete check is a little bit complicated as example but it answers your question best i think
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