Checkmk 2.0 has been recently released containing all features in-progress. The roadmap will be updated in the next weeks.
In-Progress
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
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
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.
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.
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...
To complete our already broad set of notification options, we are building integrations for Cisco WebEx Teams.
Driving scale-up even further is our motto for the current performance improvements we are working on.
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 plan to support SAML for Single Sign-On.
Planned
With Checkmk 2.0, we have already redesigned major interface concepts in Checkmk.
We plan to further enhance consistency and ensure intuitive user interfaces across the entire product.
As part of this, we plan to improve workflows for
- Activating changes
- Service discovery
- Managing hosts and folders
- and more ...
A good user experience requires a fast user interface. Thus, we plan to optimize loading times for select status views and rules configuration pages.
Building dashboards should be as easily and intuitive as possible. We plan to continue our current efforts also in the future to step-up dashboarding usability, e.g.
- Enable simple on-the-fly switching between visualization options
- Add preview option when creating dashlets
To help build useful and easy-to-understand dashboards we will add further visualization options, e.g.
- Maps, heat maps, beehive maps etc.
- Alternative options for time-series metrics
We plan also further application-specific pre-built dashboards for Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, Linux, Windows, vSphere, Oracle.
We plan to improve our Grafana integration by
- Providing a standard Checkmk dashboard (incl. tactical overview)
- Enabling dynamic dashboards by supporting variables
- Exporting annotations (comments, downtimes etc.)
- Exporting views built in Checkmk to Grafana
We further plan to improve our existing integration with InfluxDB to enable better export of metrics data
- Replace export via Graphite with direct InfluxDB connection to enable more export features
- Export additional information, e.g. labels
We plan to increase performance for activating changed for very large configurations and with a large number of configuration users.
Several concepts are being considered, e.g. activating changes for individual folders instead of for the entire configuration.
This will also improve Checkmk's capabilities for monitoring dynamic infrastructures and it will further improve automation of Checkmk.
Monitoring Kubernetes with Checkmk should be as easy as possible. We plan to automate the set-up by
- Automating the installation (YAML configs / Helm charts, Docker registry)
- Automating the initial monitoring (service discovery, activate changes)
We plan to simplify the start into Kubernetes monitoring by
- Improving usability of Kubernetes monitoring,
e.g. optimized default settings, thresholds, context info - Delivering off-the-shelf dynamic Kubernetes dashboards for different user groups, e.g. cluster admins
We will also adapt our current approach to ensure, that Checkmk always supports even the most recent versions of Kubernetes.
Checkmk can already be deployed in the cloud and provide monitoring for most cloud services.
We plan to take this even further and enable cloud-native Checkmk deployment by enabling the installation of Checkmk directly via the AWS or Azure marketplace.
To improve the usability of the Checkmk agent in the cloud and in dynamic environments, we plan to allow agents to register themselves at the monitoring server. We will also introduce a standard for pushing agent data to the Checkmk server.
We plan to build a special agent similar to AWS and Azure:
- Ready-built for dynamic configuration
- Checks for standard services
- Cloud Storage
- Compute Engine
- Cloud SQL
- Cloud Load Balancing
Additional checks are possible based on feature requests.
We plan to extend the monitoring for both AWS and Microsoft Azure, especially around databases.
We also plan to extend network monitoring for cloud services as networking becomes more and more important in the cloud.
“Blackbox” services increase importance of testing from user perspective: Synthetic monitoring (aka E2E).
We plan to provide a standard solution for synthetic monitoring with Checkmk: either by integration with another solution or by providing needed guides
Redfish has been established as the new standard for managing servers.
We plan to build a special agent and check plug-ins for vendor-independent server monitoring.
We plan to extend Windows Monitoring by improving existing check plug-ins and building new ones, e.g. for BizTalk, Sharepoint, MS Exchange, DHCP, Active Directory, file servers.
Thus, we reduce the need to jump to other systems for in-depth Windows monitoring
2FA is good practice for login procedures. There are multiple ways how to do 2FA, e.g. Hardware with Yubikey, Software with Google authenticator.
We currently plan to add optional 2FA to GUI supporting U2F using a Checkmk local validation server.
Under consideration is enabling connection to other validation servers.
With the introduction of the REST-API in Checkmk 2.0 we extended the coverage even beyond the scope of the existing APIs. Our goal is however completeness of the new REST-API: Everything can be done via an API.
With Checkmk 2.0, we already introduced several plug-in APIs, e.g. Check-API, Bakery-API, DCD-API.
We plan to further this by enabling f.e. GUI extensions via a plug-in API.
Under Consideration
The business intelligence feature of Checkmk is a powerful way to monitor business processes by aggregating your monitoring to a higher level.
The current method of doing this via rules enables configuring these aggregrations across your entire monitoring easily.
Another approach which is under consideration would be to create aggregations via drag & drop.
We plan to improve standard notification and report layouts.
Discovering dependencies using information from physical and virtual networks and application configurations (e.g. vSphere, Oracle, Kubernetes) and visualizing these dependencies.
This will help in
- resolving issues quicker
- preventing issues from happening
- reducing unnecessary notifications
Automatic correlation of metrics to find systems which experience similar atypical behaviour and powerful visualizations intelligently highlighting anomalies using large amounts of data to find root causes quicker.
Distributed tracing across microservices, hosts, and containers via integration of major APM tools (e.g. Jaeger)
We consider support for OpenMetrics, a cloud-native highly scalable protocol for applications to expose their metrics.
We consider to extend the JMX monitoring to enable in-depth monitoring of Java Application Servers.
Building on the strong foundation of being able to integrate the most important Prometheus exporters and running PromQL queries natively in Checkmk, we consider to improve this integration further:
- Integrating more Prometheus exporters
- Directly connecting to Prometheus exporters
We consider extending our monitoring capabiltites to tools common in the Kubernetes ecosystem
- Improve monitoring for interfaces and toolchain typical in Kubernetes, e.g. CSI, CNI, nginx, Cassandra, Kafka
- Further integration into Kubernetes ecosystem, e.g. Istio
- Extended visualization of network topologies and discovery of network topologies via ntop, LLDP and more.
- Enhanced monitoring for virtual networks in virtualization platforms.
- Improved monitoring of network hardware, e.g. including support info from vendors (e.g. PSIRT advisories) and support for monitoring APIs for network devices, e.g. streaming telemetry.