Scalable hybrid-monitoring for the retail sector

With Checkmk you have the right tool for meeting the high demands of IT infrastructure monitoring in wholesale and retail.

Stores, department stores and logistics centers – an IT infrastructure in retail is often more distributed than in other industries. Computing on the edge in the stores is the default and the number of endpoints is continuously increasing with the continued digitalization of stores. Facing these high demands, IT teams must still ensure the continuous operation of these distributed and complex infrastructures. IT monitoring will help you prevent IT failures, which often lead directly to a significant loss of sales-revenue and also to a negative customer experience.

From the Edge to the Cloud — the perfect monitoring solution for retail

Checkmk IT application monitoring use cases

Don't settle for less in your IT monitoring and choose Checkmk. Many retailers already monitor their IT with Checkmk and you too can benefit from our deep expertise:

Flexibility: Easily monitor your data centers, cloud platforms, networks, applications - but also your cash registers, video systems or other IoT devices.
Future-proof: With Checkmk, you can integrate existing IT systems, but also modern cloud- and container-based approaches into an unified monitoring.
Minimal staffing: Automated monitoring and an unique efficient configuration architecture make monitoring a breeze — even for large IT environments.
Scalability: Monitor distributed IT environments consisting of a large number of systems without sacrificing performance — and manage this centrally.
Modern dashboards: Check the health of your most important systems with powerful and customizable dashboards — even by location — at a glance.
Seamless integrations: Checkmk is the engine for your open observability ecosystem with its powerful REST-API and its integrations to other software.
Collaborate across teams: Customize your monitoring to meet the needs of various user groups thanks to Checkmk's intuitive UI and custom dashboards.

Read the whitepaper: IT monitoring in retail

Some of the vendors we support

Maximum monitoring with minimum effort

With Checkmk, your monitoring has no limits. Whether this involves servers, networks, applications, containers or the cloud, Checkmk can unite all of your IT assets into a single holistic hybrid monitoring system without any major configuration effort. This also includes networked and smart systems at stores, such as the emergency power supply, fire alarms, POS systems, video surveillance systems, advertising displays, locking systems and much more. Checkmk helps you map even the most complex dependencies in monitoring. This allows you to see at an early stage when problematic conditions arise and which systems may be affected.

Checkmk not only provides you with precise information on your IT infrastructure, but also alerts responsible personnel to potential problems. Workflows for troubleshooting can be precisely mapped in Checkmk and adapted to the requirements of the specific team members. For example, Checkmk can escalate issues and inform the branch manager of a specific problem via a phone call, if an issue is not being resolved.

Scale your monitoring without limits

The architecture of Checkmk with its decentralized data storage allows the integration of a hundred or more sites into a central monitoring site. When needed, Checkmk retrieves only the currently-required live data from on-site monitoring instances. This allows for a scalability of the monitoring without performance losses, and additionally allows for the flexibility of an independent monitoring at the respective site, with on-site operating, for example. The advantages of Checkmk are:

Centralized monitoring of the complete IT systems at all sites, without central data storage.
Independent IT monitoring at each branch, including optional management by local teams - no dependence on the central instance.
Monitoring without additional network traffic: Required live data from the sites is only queried specifically when needed from the central instance.
No data loss in case the network connection fails at a remote site.
Monitor hundred-thousands of systems using distributed monitoring
Thanks to Checkmk's rule-based approach even large monitoring environments can be managed effectively and centrally.

Choose automation over manual configuration

Checkmk comes with a wide range of features out of the box that allow you to quickly install and easily configure your monitoring. This reduces the manual effort to a minimum, even with many distributed locations. Set up holistic monitoring with Checkmk in just a few simple steps and gain detailed insight into the health and status of your IT.

Thanks to its Auto Discovery feature, Checkmk automatically detects relevant services to be included in the monitoring.
Predefined thresholds ensure that you will immediately receive meaningful alerts
Checkmk's REST API helps you to automate your monitoring and its management.

The rule-based configuration in Checkmk allows you to define a policy for monitoring device groups or types and/or at specific locations with only a few rules. New devices are thus directly configured correctly – no reconfiguration is required. The manual effort is thus reduced to a minimum.

Get the right access for every system

With its approximately 2,000 plug-ins, Checkmk supports most components from popular manufacturers, such as Cisco, HP, Huawai, Juniper Networks. Monitoring cloud services from AWS and Microsoft Azure or dynamic assets such as Docker or Kubernetes is also easily possible with Checkmk. In addition, Checkmk has numerous integrations to other monitoring tools, such as ntop, Grafana or Prometheus. The integration of enterprise solutions such as ServiceNow, Jira, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, etc. in Checkmk is also possible without any problems.

Extensive SNMP monitoring with plug-ins for most devices.
Seamless monitoring thanks to agents for Windows, Linux and many more.
Easy integration of your hybrid IT infrastructure into Checkmk.

Integrate other monitoring tools with Checkmk and consolidate your monitoring into Checkmk — Increase your effectiveness by no longer having to switch between different interfaces.

Fit for the future with Checkmk

With Checkmk, you can master any monitoring challenge in retail: Edge apps enable lightning-fast interaction with customers in your stores, while a cloud app for merchandise logistics coordinates inventory for the various stores. In addition, your IT infrastructure is still supplemented by traditional on-premises apps, such as a specially-secured database for regular customer data. With Checkmk, securing the performance of all systems is no problem. Checkmk is able to take into account both your traditional IT infrastructure and your container and cloud-based approaches in its monitoring:

Seamless hybrid monitoring: Monitor your on-premises, cloud, and container assets in one centralized solution.
Kubernetes monitoring: Monitor your Kubernetes environment with Checkmk using the Prometheus integration.
Intelligent cloud monitoring: Monitor your cloud applications and infrastructures and benefit from an automatic detection of cloud components.
Keep an eye on your cloud costs: Checkmk not only helps you optimize the performance of your cloud applications, but it also provides precise information about resource usage.
Unleash the power of dashboarding: Keep track and create custom dashboards to monitor all of your nodes, servers, and hosts in the cloud.

Visualize the most important information

Checkmk comes with powerful and easily-customizable dashboards. Visualize your most important metrics and gain deep insights into your IT infrastructure. In addition to the predefined dashboards, you can also intuitively customize these dashboards to suit your needs or those of a specific team. Thanks to granular user management, a role-based access to the monitoring is also possible.

Use various dashboard elements, such as host maps, time series graphs, for an informative data visualization.
Customize dashboards to meet the needs of various user groups or teams.
Let IT service teams quickly identify issues with the unique problem dashboard.

Keep the dependencies of distributed systems in view

Checkmk not only reliably provides you with information on the IT infrastructure at the respective remote sites, but also maps complex dependencies to additional systems outside the branch office, such as for goods logistics. This enables you to identify problematic conditions at an early stage and investigate causes in detail.

With its business process mapping feature, Checkmk can map dependencies between different systems. This enables you to identify problems immediately and analyze their sources. In addition, Checkmk alerts the responsible people in a targeted manner so that problems can be solved quickly.

Great reasons to choose Checkmk as monitoring tool for the retail sector

Different OS that you can monitor with Checkmk

Compatible with almost anything

Checkmk supports the monitoring of almost every operating system: Linux, Windows, macOS, but also many other OS like BSD.

Ultra-scalable & Flexible

Checkmk can monitor widely-dispersed IT environments consisting of a large number of systems and millions of services without sacrificing performance.

Intelligent Monitoring

Checkmk intelligently discovers which metrics to monitor without needing any additional configuration.

It's fast to get started

Checkmk enables you to go from zero to monitoring with minimal manual effort. The wide range of features allows you to quickly install and easily configure your monitoring.

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