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I've used Nagios and Icinga2, and I've become a huge proponent of check_mk. The documentation isn't great, but the product rocks: with very little time, you c

I've used Nagios and Icinga2, and I've become a huge proponent of check_mk. The documentation isn't great, but the product rocks: with very little time, you can start monitoring a slew of services (disk, hardware, logs, ntp) with almost no tweaking required. You can easily create custom checks, but you also have all the Nagios plug-ins it's compatible with. No daemon listens on the hosts being monitored. You get graphing for free (no setup time) for almost all your checks. It uses Nagios under the hood, it's basically an automation system that generates those Nagios systems. The GUI is amazing, because it uses a plug-in so you don't have to edit files on disk to group your hosts or tweak the alerts. Those configs are snapshotted automatically at every change, and you can replicate that configuration automatically to remote servers. Download it from the upstream site instead of relying on distro package repositories. Caveat, the documentation sucks, the GUI can be nonintuitive and it's hard to Google problems. It takes time to fully tune. Out of the box you'll probably still be impressed though.

eeZi 10y ago
Yes, check_mk is great. I rolled out a 30000+ checks installation on a single server today. I've looked at most monitoring products on the market and check_mk easily wins. It's really popular in Germany, many huge companies are using it. The English documentation isn't that great, the German one is better. That being said, it's mostly self-explanatory and all checks are very well documented in man pages. My favorite features: - Auto discovery for literally everything, including SNMP interfaces. - Fine grained rule system for customizing check threshold and parameters - All configuration is automatically versioned and you can integrate it with Git - this includes the changes you make in the web interface. - It's very easy to set up a distributed monitoring system (multisite) with a central node which aggregates all states and replicated configuration changes, yet each site is fully autonomous. - The agent takes zero network input, so no attack surface. - Even though it's extremely featureful, it's architecture is very simple and it's easy to contribute code and write custom checks. Their Git is public: http://git.mathias-kettner.de/git/?p=check_mk.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/master http://git.mathias-kettner.de/git/?p=check_mk.git;a=shortlog... It works well with Naemon and Nagios 4. Been using it for a number of projects, ask me anything! Monitoring systems not to use: - Shinken (zero security awareness and dishonest PR, when I tried it, it has so many bugs that I wouldn't ever trust it to keep my data safe) - Zabbix (it has some brilliant features, but the architecture is a mess, configuration and time series stored in a MySQL database which is hard to manage and automate, I found it cumbersome to debug, written in PHP)

eeZi 10y ago

Yes, check_mk is great. I rolled out a 30000+ checks installation on a single server today. I've looked at most monitoring products on the market and check_mk easily wins. It's really popular in Germany, many huge companies are using it. The English documentation isn't that great, the German one is better. That being said, it's mostly self-explanatory and all checks are very well documented in man pages. My favorite features: - Auto discovery for literally everything, including SNMP interfaces. - Fine grained rule system for customizing check threshold and parameters - All configuration is automatically versioned and you can integrate it with Git - this includes the changes you make in the web interface. - It's very easy to set up a distributed monitoring system (multisite) with a central node which aggregates all states and replicated configuration changes, yet each site is fully autonomous. - The agent takes zero network input, so no attack surface. - Even though it's extremely featureful, it's architecture is very simple and it's easy to contribute code and write custom checks. Their Git is public: http://git.mathias-kettner.de/git/?p=check_mk.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/master http://git.mathias-kettner.de/git/?p=check_mk.git;a=shortlog... It works well with Naemon and Nagios 4. Been using it for a number of projects, ask me anything! Monitoring systems not to use: - Shinken (zero security awareness and dishonest PR, when I tried it, it has so many bugs that I wouldn't ever trust it to keep my data safe) - Zabbix (it has some brilliant features, but the architecture is a mess, configuration and time series stored in a MySQL database which is hard to manage and automate, I found it cumbersome to debug, written in PHP)