Rockefeller University monitors its research IT infrastructure with Checkmk
Challenge
- Support mission-critical research operations with high-performance IT across campus, data centers, and hospital systems.
- Replace an outdated monitoring setup (Nagios) that caused alert fatigue (sometimes 800+ emails/day) and was hard to maintain.
- Gain reliable visibility and actionable alerting to detect issues early — before they impact system performance.
Why Checkmk?
- Precise alerting that reduces false positives and notifies teams only when action is needed.
- Strong maintenance and usability compared to the previous setup — plus easy expansion with plug-ins.
- Transparency and role-based access so multiple teams can manage their own hosts while everyone can still see the full environment (read-only).
Results
- Since 2022, monitors 850+ hosts and ~17,000 services with Checkmk Pro.
- Significantly reduced false alerts and monitoring effort — freeing time for higher-value IT work.
- Improved collaboration and visibility across departments; fewer support calls and more proactive operations.
About Rockefeller University
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Industry
Education
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Headquarters
New York City, USA
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Employees
1,325
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Monitored hosts/services
850+ hosts/ ~17,000 services
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Solution
Checkmk Pro
We need a monitoring that allows us to counteract issues, before they impact the performance of our IT. We found it with Checkmk.
Challenge
High performance is essential
Rockefeller University is one of the leading institutes in the field of biochemical research. Since its foundation in 1901 a total of 26 Nobel Prize winners have attended the institution. To be able to continue conducting science at such a high level of innovation, the functioning of the IT infrastructure is one of the top priorities.
The IT team aims to provide all of the necessary resources to ensure the best performance of all research facilities. Due to its high standards and the fact that the university has no undergraduate students, rather mostly researchers as users, the development of a large IT infrastructure has been necessary.
Most of the hardware resources are hosted in data centers with focus on high performance computing. The IT teams runs server clusters with around 6,000 CPU cores in total. The IT infrastructure also has to support healthcare devices in the university hospital that is also on campus. The facilities all together consist of more than 50 labs from different scientific fields. Besides biochemical labs, this also includes maker spaces and manufacturing workshops. In all of them, users expect the IT to run at peak performance.
Monitoring is crucial for Rockefeller University. The university previously used Nagios, but the solution generated too many false alerts, took a lot of effort to maintain and did not provide the desired visibility. The IT team found Checkmk Community as an alternative to replace Nagios.
Checkmk can store data for a long time. This allows us to understand the impacts of actions, regardless of whether they occurred recently or in the past. We can always trace issues back and gain insights to improve our IT infrastructure and business processes.
Solution
From basic monitoring to proactive insights
After using Checkmk for a few years, in 2022 the IT team decided to switch to Checkmk Pro to make better use of the collected monitoring data. The additional features are helping the IT team to act more proactively.
Checkmk monitors all assets in the data centers and the networks, such as enterprise applications, servers, switches, and storage. The monitoring includes more than 850 hosts with around 17,000 services. Over the years, the IT team has developed a few of its own plug-ins, but monitors most of its systems with the official Checkmk plug-ins. The implementation went smoothly and the IT team is pleased that Checkmk only notifies them when they really need to take action. Checkmk has significantly reduced the number of false alerts and the working hours spent on the monitoring.
Results
More transparency and efficient communication
The biggest advantage with Checkmk, however, is the improved visibility and transparency in the monitoring. Each department can adjust the monitoring of their hosts to their needs. At the same time, every user can have read-only access to the complete Checkmk environment and can see all hosts.
Thus, everyone is on the same page and can check whether an issue with their systems is related to another issue in a different department. This is possible because Checkmk has a granular access control and the IT team provides admin rights to different user groups by using a simple folder structure in Checkmk. This enables teams for areas such as IT security, applications, or the help desk to create and manage their own hosts in Checkmk.
Rockefeller University is very pleased with Checkmk. The number of support calls has dropped since the implementation of the monitoring. The IT team also has more time for other things besides monitoring and can focus on more important tasks
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Actionable, high-signal alerting
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Scalable campus-wide infrastructure monitoring
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Reduced maintenance and false positives
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Environment-wide transparency and visibility
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Proactive, pre-impact troubleshooting
The communication and support from Checkmk is great. We are treated well, and we are glad that we have chosen Checkmk.
About the customer
Rockefeller University is a leading biomedical research institution in New York City, dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity. Its researchers rely on high-performance computing and modern lab and campus technologies to support demanding scientific work. To keep these systems running at peak performance, the university’s IT team operates data centers and campus-wide infrastructure — and uses monitoring to detect issues early, improve collaboration across teams, and ensure consistent service quality for labs and researchers.
