Ep. 10: Detecting configuration errors with the Analyze Configuration feature

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[0:00:00]	Welcome back to the Checkmk channel and in this episode, we're looking at Analyze configuration.
[0:00:15]	We have added the Analyze configuration feature to Checkmk to help you recognize certain configuration problems in your Checkmk installation and these are mostly related to performance and security. You can find the Analyze configuration page in the Setup menu of Checkmk.
[0:00:31]	So if we now go to setup then you find the Analyze configuration page here under the maintenance section. So let's click it, and it will take a few seconds to load the page because it's already running a few tests.
[0:00:51]	So in this overview, you can see that most of the states are OK, but we have four Warnings here. And if you look at the bottom one, the Secure GUI (HTTP), and this is a Warning because we are currently using an unencrypted connection to serve the GUI.
[0:01:11]	It's of course recommended that you use HTTPS instead of HTTP, so a connection with an SSL encryption. This is a bit more work to set up because you would first need to buy or generate an SSL certificate and you can find exactly how to set all of this up in our documentation.
[0:01:30]	For each test here you have some additional information. And you can see that information if you click on the blue icon at the beginning of each row. Let's have a closer look at one of the tests. in particular the number of apache processes. So let's look at the additional information. Here you can read that by default 64 apache processors may be started at the same time.
[0:01:57]	What are these Apache processes? Apache is the web server used to serve you the Checkmk user interface and 64 processes means that at the same time 64 users can request a page.
[0:02:10]	And one of these processes is only needed for the time that it takes to generate this page and then send a response. So this is actually quite a lot of processes, especially for my test site here I don't need that many so let's change that. So I can change this setting by clicking here on the link.
[0:02:31]	So let's change this factory setting of 64, and we'll make it 10 that should be more than enough for us. So now hit save and then we need to activate the change. So activate. This should at least save us some memory. So now once we go back to Analyze configuration.
[0:03:00]	You can see here that the test is still yellow. And why is that? Because Checkmk cannot know what the right value is for your information, it really depends on the size of your installation and how many people work in it at the same time. So it's important that you either acknowledge the problem or disable the test.
[0:03:20]	And you can acknowledge the problem simply by clicking on this icon on the right side And with that you basically tell Checkmk: okay I know there is a warning but in this case, I don't care about it because I've already dealt with it.
[0:03:34]	So you should go through this list one time and make sure you deal with all the warnings, and after that you only have to visit this page from time to time just to make sure that everything is still configured correctly. And when there is anything yellow you should fix it when everything is green then your system should be performing fairly well and should be secured to a certain extent.
[0:03:54]	Now I have to point out that there is not a test for every possible configuration error that can be made. So even if everything is green that doesn't guarantee that's completely secure. But when not everything is green and that's a good indication that there are some performance or security issues and you should have a closer look.
[0:04:15]	So that was it for today. I hope this video was helpful to you if so please subscribe to the channel and like the video. See you next time.