Hey,
I’m running on the newest Checkmk Enterprise version 2.4.0p21, but I need to move to MSP.
How is the upgrade path for that upgrade? Just installing the version and switching the site?
I didn’t find something in the docs.
Thanks & BR,
n3m0
Yes pretty sure that’s how I did it a couple of years back on an earlier version.
You can install the MSP edition package alongside the Enterprise one, copy your Enterprise site to a new site, and then ‘cmk update’ - should show the CME edition there to upgrade to.
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Pretty much what @burgeau said. The official documentation is section 6.2. MSP includes Cloud, that’s why that section is still relevant to you.
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Do you need it for technical reasons (you need multi-tenancy)? Or do you need it for legal/contract reasons (you are acting as a service provider)?
In case it is only for legal/contract reasons, you might continue using Enterprise (or Cloud) with the MSP license. This sometimes allows for more flexibility, because there is no downgrade path anymore for sites that have been switched to MSP.
Forgot to add what @mschlenker just said: we are in that boat. We’ve licensed MSP (as that’s what we are from the licensing POV) but running Enterprise due to the lower complexity and lack of need of features included in Cloud. The CheckMK folks are usually happy as long as they get their money.
Both reasons actually. We wanted to monitor customer environments and therefore use the multi tenancy feature.
So you and @mbunkus are using enterprise, but licensed as MSP because of the complexity of MSP? Did I get that correctly?
Thanks @burgeau! I’ll try that
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@mschlenker writes documentation 
The MSP edition has a different data model to enable the multi-tenancy. Thus configuration objects need a “customer” attribute to ensure that the remote sites only get the configuration synced which is applicable for the customer. If you ever want to move back from MSP to Enterprise/Raw, that is not easily possible currently, due to the different data models.
This is the complexity.
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Hi Martin, ah didn’t knew that
Okay, understood the issue. Will there be a way back to enterprise in the future? Or is this not planned at all?
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it is planned to unify the configuration model across all editions. not clear yet, when this will happen, but we plan to eventually only offer one build and allow users to switch between editions with license keys. that is a bit in the future though tbh
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I with my company pay for MSP but use Enterprise, yes. The reason is that the data model used by MSP doesn’t map cleanly to how we monitor things. The idea behind the data model in the MSP edition is, as @martin.hirschvogel wrote, to separate data of customers so that each Checkmk instance (site) only contains the data belonging to that one customer, and users of that customer only having access to the sites belonging to that customer.
We monitor slightly more than 80 customers, with one site per customer located in their on-prem networks, but also with a couple of hosts & services monitored from a central location located in a cloud data center instead of from their site. This multiple-customers-on-one-central-instance thing we do is what doesn’t map onto the MSP’s data model. If we wanted to keep that we would have to run an additional site per customer in the cloud data center, massively bumping the amount of resources required for hosting them (several GB RAM, several VMs due to much higher number of processes etc). I don’t imagine the web UI gets magically faster when we go from 80 to 160 sites.
On top of that we don’t need the other features that the MSP edition provides.
Those two combined are the reason why we keep using Enterprise, which basically boils down to “reduced complexity”.
Note that we could upgrade to MSP and simply not separate data into different customers, keeping all hosts/services/users within one customer. As far as I understand this would allow us to keep using the same monitoring setup, with the same drawbacks as now (no strict separation of data), but with access to the additional features the MSP offers outside of data separation. It’s just that we don’t need those at the moment.
None of this is an endorsement to use Enterprise over MSP. It’s just an explanation why we do what we do, and to offer a potential route for you to chose.
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