Roadmap

Checkmk has grown drastically with its features over the last years, that the product has also become more complex. This year we have launched a UX project to rethink how you can more easily and intuitively navigate Checkmk.

Our goal is to maintain Checkmk’s flexibility but speed up learning curve for new and ‘casual’ users

We are working on

• New navigation
  • Sidebar
  • In-page context buttons
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Powerful search
• Clarity
  • Simplified pages/forms
  • Clarify of naming
  • Fresh design and icons
• Basic vs. advanced user settings

The Checkmk Raw Edition will receive a modernized graphing, one which is already being used in the Enterprise Edition.

Our goal is to provide a consistent look and feel for all editions. This means that the HTML5 graphs from the Enterprise Edition will completely replace the PNP4Nagios previously used for visualizations in the Raw Edition – but not with the full range of functions. For example, individual or combined graphs are still only available in the Enterprise Edition of Checkmk.

The technical conversion behind it now also enables Grafana integration for the Raw Edition.

We are building new forms of visualization (dashlets) and work on simplifying the creation of dashboards. These can now be context-sensitive as well, and allow the presentation of specific facts, such as all information for Host X.

We are also planning dashboards tailored to certain applications, in addition to Checkmk itself for vSphere, Linux or Windows.

New dashlets will be

•     Single metrics
•     Bar charts
•     Scatter plots

We are improving the existing integration with Grafana, which is being supported since Checkmk 1.6 for the Enterprise Editions.

Furthermore, the Grafana integration will also become available for the Checkmk Raw Edition.

Your monitoring hosts an ocean of valuable data. Understanding historic performance is key for predicting future trends. Thus we are implementing a feature to analzye historic data.

A seperate feature for advanced forecasting and capacity management will also become available directly in Checkmk. This can help identify problems early and anticipate capacity requirements. This function can also be embedded in reports.

Network monitoring has always been a core Checkmk strength with focus on network performance monitoring, metrics, interface states and alarming. We have already a broad set of plugins for network monitoring.

Now we go even further. We have partnered with one of the leading providers for flow analysis: ntop.

We are building a deep integration between ntop and Checkmk. This allows for a deeper root cause analyses and network flow analyse,  in-depth performance monitoring and support threat detection.

We are building one integrated view for Dev and Infra Ops team to jointly prevent and fix problems faster.

We are developing an integration of top Prometheus ‘Exporters’ for Kubernetes monitoring and support of running and monitoring custom PromQL queries directly from within Checkmk.

Driving scale-up even further is our motto for the current performance improvements we are working on.

At the moment so called helper processes do both the computation of the check results and collect the raw monitoring data. The RAM-intensive helper process of checking often has to wait for network I/Os and thus limits the scalability of the helpers.

In order to reduce the dependency on the network I/O, we have divided the helper process in two. Fetcher processes should collect the raw monitoring data. A checker process then evaluates the collected data. By separating the helper process, we enable companies to further scale monitoring with Checkmk by using our software to use the existing hardware resources much more efficiently and with better performance.

In addition to the scaling, we also worked on the activate changes workflow. Up until now, with each activation Checkmk has packed the entire configuration into a snapshot, synchronized it, and unpacked it again on the desired monitoring sites. In the future we will accelerate this process by having Checkmk synchronize the configuration incrementally when changes are activated. Nothing changes on the surface for the user – 'under the hood' Checkmk only synchronizes a fraction of the previous data, since it only transmits the actual changes made.

We are developing a new REST-API to cover all of the functions that are currently available in Checkmk – be it via the GUI or the command line. We are pursuing the goal of making the new API as simple as possible for the user. This means that even less-experienced users can retrieve their values from the API, for example through easy-to-understand error messages, complete documentation of the API, and an API whose behaviour is easy to understand.

It will be supporting JSON. We also use the current OpenAPI Specification, OpenAPI 3.0 (OAS 3.0), to describe our API. The API is also based on HTTP/1.1. It will confirm to the third level of the Richardson Maturity Model.

We are standardizing and simpifying development with the introduction of several APIs:

• Check-API
• Inventory-API
• Bakery-API

Especially check plug-in development will be simplified thus, not only for us and but also for everyone user buidling their own integrations.

The agent updater from the central site so far always needed to communicate to every agent directly in order to update it. In segmented networks this might not be feasible. In large environments, this causes unnecessary load on the network.

Distributed agent updates will allow a roll-out of agent updates from within remote sites, thus enabling the use of it in segmented networks and also saving bandwith.

Extension of the popular labels and tags feature. Labels will now not only be imported from Kubernetes and Cloud environemnts, but will also be directly discovered and set by Checkmk.

Through the labels you can for example filter views for specific host types, operating systems family and specific versions, or custom labels. You can also define notification conditions based on these labels.

We are building new check plug-ins and enhancing existing checks plug-ins for many systems and applications.

Application Monitoring:
Graylog, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, Couchbase, Oracle, Jira, Jenkins, JMX, Apache, SAP, Zerto, Kapersky, and more...

Infrastructure Monitoring:
Huawei, tp-link, PulseSecure, BeyondTrust, Cisco, Arista, Aruba, Entersekt, Dell EMC ECS, ScaleIO, HPE, NetApp, Fujitsu, QNAP, Ceph, Nutanix, Proxmox, VMware, and more...