Scalable server monitoring software for Sysadmins and DevOps
Ensure peak server performance for your infrastructure with the best server monitoring. Say goodbye to preventable outages, late nights, or weekend emergencies.
- Monitor any type of server (web, mail, database servers etc.)
- Flexible server monitoring through the use of more than 2,000 smart checks
- Easy-to-use configuration, auto-discovery and network mapping
- Native agents for Windows, Linux and many more operating systems
- Agentless monitoring with SNMP and TCP/UDP (FTP, LDAP, IMAP etc.)
- API-based checks based on HTTP/XML, SSH or TELNET
- Measurement intervals as short as 1 second
Some of the vendors we support
Reasons to choose Checkmk as your server monitoring tool
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
One Checkmk instance can monitor thousands of servers and can easily scale horizontally with our distributed monitoring setup.
Intelligent Monitoring
Checkmk intelligently discovers which metrics to monitor on your server without needing any additional configuration.
It's fast to get started
Checkmk enables you to go from zero to monitoring in less than 15 minutes. Thus, the installation of your new server monitoring solution is super easy and fast!
An all-in-one server monitoring software
Your organization uses multiple types of servers. It is therefore important to use a server monitoring software that can help you can get started with all of your server monitoring at once.
Checkmk provides this flexibility through its large collection of more than 2,000 plug-ins. Here are some examples of server types which can be monitored with Checkmk:
- Mail server monitoring — Make sure your mail servers function reliably by using one of our generic POP3, IMAP or SMTP checks. Get detailed information on your mail application with our plug-ins for MS Exchange, Postfix, qmail and more.
- Web server monitoring — Ensure minimal downtime for your web servers by getting alerts from our active HTTP, FTP and SSL checks. Monitor performance metrics of your Apache and Nginx web servers.
- Database server monitoring — Checkmk supports monitoring of all major databases: MySQL/MariaDB, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MongoDB, IBM DB2, IBM Informix, SAP HANA, Microsoft Azure SQL and Amazon Web Services RDS.
- Application server monitoring — Checkmk helps monitor almost all Java applications servers (e.g. JBoss, Oracle WebLogic, Apache Tomcat, IBM WebSphere)
- FTP server monitoring — Track the availability and response times of your FTP server, and monitor of your servers' CPU load, capacity, memory utilization, network latency and packet loss.
Linux server monitoring
Get an accurate overview of your Linux servers' health and performance. We support the following Linux OS: Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE, SLES and other derivatives, as well as all other DEB-based distributions.
Benefits of Linux server monitoring with Checkmk:
- Minimal footprint (the agent requires little CPU, RAM or hard drive space)
- Full transparency (only a shell script is executed in which you can see all commands)
- Complete security (the agent permits no access from the network whatsoever)
Windows server monitoring
Monitor your Windows servers and gain insights into critical metrics such as CPU, memory, disk usage, services, processes, network interfaces, filesystems and more. Quickly identify and resolve any performance or availability issues.
Benefits of Windows server monitoring with Checkmk:
- Integrated log management for Windows Event Log
- Easily integrate monitoring for MS Exchange, Active Directory, MS SQL and Skype
- Monitor the latest Windows OS and older versions (Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 etc.)
- Use a simple executable file with no DLL dependencies (no risk of malicious code injection as the agent doesn't read data from the network)
Virtual server monitoring
Monitor the health and availability of your virtualized server environment. Checkmk supports the real-time monitoring of all major virtualization platforms, such as VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and associated virtual machines.
Virtual server monitoring is already integrated in Checkmk, so that your virtual machines can be monitored with almost no additional set-up. Checkmk itself can also be run on a virtual server infrastructure within the virtual appliance.
Centralized Asset Management
The Checkmk hardware & software inventory is built to automatically discover and manage your hardware & software asset information on all servers and workstations being monitored.
Easily identify hosts with vulnerable and outdated software versions, so that you can act to secure your IT. Checkmk also stores the history of the inventory of a server and helps you track changes in your environment, e.g. a BIOS update, RAM upgrade.
Integrate Checkmk with your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to always have an up-to-date overview of your IT.
Visualize data for best server monitoring
As one of the best server monitoring software Checkmk not only provides powerful monitoring agents for most server operating systems, such as Windows, Linux and Unix. It also supports agentless monitoring via SNMP, IPMI, WMI or Redfish as well as data collection via server vendor interfaces.
Checkmk combines status, metrics, and log-based data in one solution and provides numerous visualization options with powerful dashboards. This allows you to get the most out of your monitoring.
Monitor server performance
Checkmk allows you to just focus on the performance metrics of your systems, if necessary. By monitoring server performance, you can strictly keep an eye on CPU utilization, memory consumption, disk I/O and network performance of your physical servers or more specific metrics regarding the use case of the server.
Thus, you monitor for example the response time of a web server, the network bandwidth utilization for a backup server, or even the waiting time for each written memory block (latency) and input/output operations per second (IOPS) of a file server.
A server performance monitoring tool like Checkmk can provide clues to possible bottlenecks and help in eliminating performance problems as well as using the performance data to verify SLAs, such as whether servers provided the required performance in a specific time frame.
The whole Checkmk environment has a very mature, stable foundation of supported checks and performance counters. Yet it grows almost on a daily basis.
Support for new systems is being implemented very often and if you are willing to request it yourself, you can have it included in the core distribution in very little time. This agility really has no match among the larger competitors.
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FAQ
Server monitoring software like Checkmk allows IT admins to collect data from servers in their IT environment. Based on these collected server metrics IT admins can detect and diagnose any issues that may threaten a server's performance or stability.
As servers perform business-critical tasks, they are essential for the success of every company. Thus, server monitoring is besides network monitoring one of the most critical tasks when it comes to IT infrastructure monitoring.
It helps IT teams to ensure the smooth running of IT processes by monitoring underlying technology as well as monitoring server and application performance. In this way a server monitoring system can act as an early warning system that permits corrective actions to be taken before a company experiences an outage or performance bottlenecks in its IT.
If you are searching for a server monitoring software you should focus on these 5 points to avoid blind spots and include all relevant elements when monitoring your servers:
- Monitoring data: The monitoring software must be able to collect data in a meaningful way. This includes agentless monitoring via SNMP, WMI, IPMI or Redfish as well as agent-based monitoring via powerful agents provided by the monitoring vendor.
- Resource requirements: To monitor servers should not consume unnecessary capacity on the host and the network. Thus, the footprint of the server monitor should always be as small as possible.
- Agent management and adaptability: Clarify how the monitoring software of your choice manages its monitoring agents. This includes the installation on the target systems as well as the adaption of the agent configuration. Automation and an easy-to-use web interface boost the efficiency of your monitoring capabilities.
- Compatibility and availability: Check, if the provider of the server monitoring solution maintains its software with updated and patches. Another point to consider here is the compatibility between platforms, e.g. when it comes to a hybrid infrastructure monitoring.
- Security and transparency: Sysadmins need to know, over which specific protocols and ports the monitoring agent communicates and how it establishes the connection between the servers and the server monitoring software.
Yes. The Checkmk Enterprise Standard Edition is a server monitoring solution that has basically no limit in how many servers you can monitor. And the pricing is not based on the number of servers you monitor. Rather the total number of monitored services is used to determine your subscription size.
Checks are performed by the monitoring system to 'check' the state of a host or a service on a host. Checks use plug-ins to monitor specific or custom metrics as well as the states of a host (e.g. server, switch, storage) or application.
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