We are new to checkmk & beginning to setup our environment, we set up a server with help from Prof Services, for a single site, configured some specialized agents via the bakery, then started testing/pushing out those agents to hosts, registering them, etc.
We’ve decided that we are going to now go with a distributed monitoring configuration, with one central site, and two remote sites. The site we started with, which contains the baked agents, etc. is NOT going to be the central site, but instead a remote site.
My questions are:
I’m assuming we need to re-create all the agents via the bakery on the new central site, to match the ones we have on the future remote site?
or,
can we continue to use the baked agents we have - but simply change the name when registering the agents to point to the new central site?
Does each site (including central) have to have it’s own agents, for the hosts that will be registered to that site?
Slowly stepping deeper into the monitoring trenches here.
Thanks for any guidance.
-DD
Use the distributed agent bakery and register hosts to the checkmk satellites
If you want to use the second option, which makes sense in larger and geographically spread networks, as the agent updater plugin will download the packages from the registered site, you must have https connectivity from the satellites to your central site.
If that exists (routing, firewall), you can configure the URL in the global settings “Connection to central agent bakery” and the satellites will then work as some sort of proxy that forwards the register requests of the hosts to the central site and will download and provide the agents to the registered hosts.
Additionally the agent updater plugin must be correctly configured in the agent updater rule, usually you end up with one rule per satellite, as the satellite must be provided to the hosts that should register to that satellite.
If you want to migrate the agent updater registrations from the satellite to the central site, you can just copy all registrations from /omd/sites/<your_site>/var/check_mk/agent_deployment/ from the satellite to the central site and enable the central agent bakery afterwards.
This may not be the official supported way, but i did exactly that today and it works.
Test it before and make backups
And keep in mind - when you integrate your satellite in the distributed setup of the central site, everything will be overwritten with the central configuration.
