Checkmk System Requirements

Checkmk operates efficiently, requiring only moderate resources. To help you make the most of this efficiency, we’ve prepared a brief overview of the system requirements.

The table below outlines the recommended resources per site. These estimates apply to both physical hardware and virtual machines and are based on a typical mix of monitored systems.

Overview

Check Generic guidelines: This page provides general guidelines on the hardware / system requirements needed to run Checkmk.

Check Infrastructure differences: Each IT infrastructure differs, so the hardware requirements for monitoring can vary significantly depending on your specific environment.

Check Low requirements: Checkmk is one of the least resource hungry monitoring systems available.

Check One server: Checkmk requires only one bare-bones Linux server, virtual or physical, no additional database, proxies, etc.

Recommended system resources

Monitored Hosts	Monitored Services	CPU¹	RAM	Disk
100	3,000	2 Cores, 2.0GHz	8 GB	120 GB SSD
500	15,000	4 Cores, 2.0GHz	16 GB	240 GB SSD
1,000	30,000	4 Cores, 2,4GHz	24 GB	240 GB SSD
2,500	50,000 - 75,000	8 Cores, 2,4GHz	32 GB	480 GB SSD
5,000	100,000 - 150,000	8 Cores, 3.0GHz	48 GB	480 GB SSD
10,000	300,000 - 400,000	12 Cores, 3.0GHz	128 GB+	960 GB SSD

Note: More hosts/services can be monitored on more powerful systems. We recommend horizontal scaling via distributed monitoring at some point though.

Additionally, please note that these estimates pertain to the commercial editions of Checkmk. Checkmk Raw will utilize more resources or might not scale to the amount of services due to limitations of the Nagios core.

¹General purpose x86-64 CPU.

Supported Operating Systems

Linux Distributions:

Debian
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Ubuntu
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

Containers:

Docker

Virtualization Environments:

Officially supported platforms for the Checkmk Appliance:

VMware
Proxmox
Microsoft Hyper-V

Platforms that work in practice but are not officially supported (yet):

Citrix Xen
Nutanix AVH

*Specific support commitment can be found here.

What are you monitoring?

How much monitoring you get out of your system depends a lot on what and how you monitor. SNMP-based monitoring and active checks typically consume much more resources than monitoring using Checkmk agents. Our estimates are based on a typical mix of systems encountered in larger on-premise IT environments.

Scale up or scale out?

When facing resource constraints, you have two options – add resources to your server (scale up) or offload some consumption on an additional site (scale out). Thanks to Checkmk‘s powerful distributed monitoring architecture, scaling out is as easy as scaling up. It is up to you, what works best for you.

Physical or virtual?

We like physical servers, but running Checkmk in a virtual machine or a docker container works just as well and especially for smaller environments, this is often the chosen setup. Physical servers have the advantage of being independent of a virtualization environment and enable using an SMS modem to implement real out-of-band notifications. VMs on the other hand are more flexible and easier to manage. Again, it is up to you, what works best for you.

What about clustering and high availability?

If you want to ensure a high availability of your monitoring, you can set up a failover cluster for your monitoring server. The physical Checkmk appliance comes with built-in HA to protect against hardware failure out-of-the-box. You can cluster two physical appliances for maximum safety, or use your hypervisor’s high availability features for best resilience against hardware failure.

Any questions left?

Send us an email: sales@checkmk.com