ThinkHuge makes the move from Paessler PRTG to Checkmk
Challenge
- Monitor a global, decentralized infrastructure across 12 data centers to ensure performance, redundancy, and low latency for VPS services.
- Consolidate monitoring tools without losing visibility or interrupting operations during the transition.
- Align monitoring with the company’s Linux-first strategy after retiring Windows servers for security reasons.
Why Checkmk?
- Runs natively on Linux, matching ThinkHuge’s hosting and security strategy.
- Fast rollout with an intuitive UI and strong documentation — migration from PRTG took only a few hours.
- Broad coverage via 2,000+ official integrations, plus an open approach that allows custom extensions when needed.
Results
- Switched from Paessler PRTG to Checkmk Pro and now monitors all 12 data centers from a single Checkmk host.
- Full visibility across servers, network devices, and power systems, totaling 25,000+ services.
- Better operational clarity: dependencies help identify root causes in redundant setups, enabling fixes without risking service disruption.
About ThinkHuge
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Industry
Financial Services
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Headquarters
Eyam, United Kingdom
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Employees
60
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Monitored hosts/services
600+/ 25,000+
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Solution
Checkmk Pro
Challenge
Secure and reliable data centers are essential
ThinkHuge is an expert in digital innovation in the forex industry. The company runs a wide range of platforms to support traders with educational information and virtual platform services such as Virtual Private Servers (VPS). To ensure 100% uptime, redundancy, and low latency, the IT team has built their own private cloud environment. The necessary hardware resources are hosted in 12 data centers around the globe at multiple locations in Asia, Europe, and the USA. To ensure customer satisfaction and a good user experience, ThinkHuge needs to monitor all of its IT assets.
The monitoring has to be reliable, and also needs to work efficiently without needing management by a dedicated monitoring team. It also has to support decentralized infrastructures. In 2022 the leadership team had decided to abandon all Windows servers due to security concerns, and switch all systems to Linux. Thus, the monitoring must also use Linux as the host system.
Because of this decision, the IT team made Checkmk their monitoring tool for all of their IT assets. By 2022, ThinkHuge had already been using the Checkmk Community for several years, but was also monitoring systems with Paessler PRTG, which had to be retired due to the fact that it relies on Windows as its host system. Given their good experience with Checkmk in the past, the leadership team decided to switch to Checkmk Pro and monitor their complete infrastructure with just this single tool.
Solution
One monitoring platform for 12 global data centers
The implementation went smoothly. The IT team installed a Checkmk instance on a Linux server and added all the hosts. Checkmk’s graphical user interface makes the whole implementation process very straightforward. The Checkmk user guide additionally provided guidance for specific systems. Altogether, the installation of Checkmk and the transition away from PRTG required only a few hours of work.
Another advantage with Checkmk are the well thought-out host structures that allow ThinkHuge to address their customers’ needs by adding precise dependencies between hosts. For example, ThinkHuge made sure all assets are built redundant. If there is an issue with a system, Checkmk understands this architecture and can identify the exact root-cause of a problem for the IT team, even if the overall business process still runs as it should. The IT team can fix the issue without running the risk of interruption.
Results
Full visibility at scale
All members of the IT team have access to the monitoring and see the current status of an issue. Thanks to Checkmk, everyone is on the same page and has a full understanding of the situation.
Checkmk monitors hosts such as servers, switches, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and other devices found in a data center. Because ThinkHuge relies on several vendors in different countries, the monitoring has to support a wide range of systems. The IT teams appreciates that Checkmk on the one hand supports many systems out-of-the-box, but also has an open core. In the case of a system without an official monitoring plug-in, the IT team can simply write their own integration with relatively little effort.
ThinkHuge is pleased that they chose Checkmk. When the infrastructure grows or changes, the IT team is able to adapt the monitoring with just a few minutes work.
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Consolidated monitoring standardization
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Rapid GUI-based implementation
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Centralized multi-data center oversight
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Scalable multi-device infrastructure coverage
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Accelerated root-cause troubleshooting
About the customer
ThinkHuge is a global service provider in the forex industry, supporting millions of retail traders with platforms, educational resources, and performance-critical virtual services such as Virtual Private Servers (VPS). To deliver low latency, redundancy, and reliable uptime, ThinkHuge operates a private cloud environment across 12 data centers in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Monitoring is a key capability to keep this distributed infrastructure stable, identify anomalies early, and protect customer experience as the environment grows.
