USER EXPERIENCE
A redesigned interface for a better user experience
Fast-paced organizations need to tackle their challenges quickly. That's why for Checkmk 2.0, we worked hard to bring a dramatic user experience improvement, to enable both beginners and experts to focus on what matters and get things done easier and faster.
We completely changed the navigation and introduced the Navbar and SideBar, meticulously refining the details to reduce cognitive load and make it simpler for you to find what you need.
Simplified main navigation with new Navbar & Sidebar
Get things done faster with new search functionality
New categorization of rules
Improved filters for views
Beginner and Expert mode +
Dark and Bright Theme
Dynamic filters
Auto-discovery for labels, host & service labels for notification
Understand your tag usage with new overview page
Simplified service discovery
PRO-ACTIVE MONITORING
Make better decisions with Forecast Analytics
Checkmk enables you to be in control when a problem in your IT occurs. Now, we want to take it further and help you tackle issues before they arise.
Forecasting was already introduced as a preview in the last Checkmk version and we have enhanced it further for Checkmk 2.0. The prediction engine is powered by a sophisticated model that can consider many factors that your data shows on a daily basis. It's designed mainly for capacity forecasts, but is also applicable to a variety of other use cases (Enterprise only).
MODERN GRAPHING
Modern graphs for the Checkmk Raw Edition
Our open source users now finally have a modern graphing system! We have ported most of the Enterprise Edition's graphing system to the Checkmk Raw Edition, replacing the old PNP4nagios graphing. Some features like custom graphing remain exclusive to the Enterprise Edition though.
It's now also possible to connect Grafana to the Checkmk Raw Edition.
DASHBOARDS
Powerful dashboard features
Everything you need at a glance. Take advantage of highly customizable dashboards, with new dashlets that you can customize to visualize your most important metrics.
Prometheus integration
Simplicity of Checkmk + Flexibility of Prometheus
As IT infrastructure gets even more complex, ITOps and DevOps teams need to collaborate closely more than ever. This has been our motivation in launching the Prometheus integration in 1.6, and improving it further based on our community's feedback.
The integration offers a flexible and powerful Kubernetes monitoring via integration of important Prometheus exporters.
PromQL queries are integrated with configurable thresholds. The integration now also supports namespace filtering, HTTPS, global proxy, certificate verification and improved configuration.
Cloud & container monitoring
Extended Cloud and Container Monitoring
Enhanced support for organizations with hybrid infrastructure.
- AWS
- Support of proxies in special agent
- Improved monitoring for ELB
- Improved monitoring for EC2 & RDS
- New Glacier monitoring
- New DynamoDB monitoring
- New Web Application Firewalls (v2 only) monitoring
- Azure: Active Directory Connect monitoring
- Kubernetes
- Ingress, jobs, endpoints, pod conditions monitoring & several bug-fixes
- Use of namespaces as a host prefix
- Support for new Kubernetes versions
Network flow monitoring
Detailed insights into your network
Checkmk has always been a reliable tool in monitoring the status of everything in your network. Now you can also have an in-depth analysis of your network traffic with the integration of network flows into Checkmk via ntop (Enterprise only).
- Traffic dashboards for your network
- View alerts, characterized by duration, severity and alert type
- Filter flows in many dimensions to analyze your networks
- Detailed views for your hosts: traffic, packets, ports, peers
Network interface and switch port monitoring
Simplified configuration for network monitoring
Simpler network interface monitoring with reworked discovery rulesets for network interfaces & switch ports. Monitor individual or grouped interfaces with one ruleset now and configure them with a more intuitive workflow.
Automation
Introducing the new REST-API
Major leap to improve how you can automate your configuration and monitoring with the new REST-API — built using best practices with always up-to-date docs.
The new REST-API provides more functionality than the existing APIs, e.g. now supporting downtimes, time periods, problem acknowledgements, agent bakery and the BI.
Extensibility
Easier custom plug-in development
Developing your own extensions for Checkmk is now much simpler with a versioned, well-defined API.
- It is easier to write check plug-ins
- You can run checks separately
- You can leverage Python IDEs
- You can test your code
- And many improvements in the detail (e.g. cluster compatibility)
Automation and extensibility
More improvements to automate your monitoring
Updates to automate your monitoring so you can let Checkmk do all the work for you. The agent bakery (Enterprise only) has been improved and comes with new features as well:
- Distributed Agent Updates for roll-out in segmented networks
- Create bakery plug-ins easier & faster with the Bakery API
- Roll-out custom plug-ins due to support of local files
- Configurable network service (systemd or xinetd) for Linux agents
- Dynamically handle Python version on monitored host
We also added an API for the dynamic configuration, so that you can build custom connectors.
PERFORMANCE
Up to 4x less memory usage at same performance
Checkmk 2.0 is packed with new features, and normally with great power comes great resource usage. However, instead of making you worry on how your resources can cope, we changed a crucial part of the software architecture altogether: a new helper model for the the Checkmk Microcore (Enterprise only).
Here are the some further performance improvement highlights for this version:
- Faster activate changes in distributed monitoring with incremental config sync
- Improved speed of site snapshot packaging for distributed monitoring
- Up to 100x faster update of DNS entries of hosts
- Up to 6x faster configuration loading time for setups with many folders
- Faster rule evaluation by using explicit host attributes
- Improved handling of sites with large number of piggyback hosts
- Faster rendering of graphs with high data resolution
EXTEND THE MONITORING BASE
Improved Windows agent platform
Continuous improvement of the Windows agent after a complete rewrite in the previous Checkmk version. Now coming with an optional Python environment.
- Support for cross-platform agent plug-ins
- No more false virus alarms for agent updater
- Improved stability and performance
- Improved diagnostics
- No more manual configuration of Windows Firewall
- Any many further bug and security fixes and usability improvements
EXTEND THE MONITORING BASE
Now with over 2,000 check plug-ins
Checkmk continues to adapt to the modern organization’s complex monitoring needs. The new version comes with new plug-ins and improvements to the existing ones, covering your server monitoring, network and application monitoring use cases.
