Werk #18904: Synthetic Monitoring: Introduce micromamba as RCC replacement
| Component | Checks & agents | ||
| Title | Synthetic Monitoring: Introduce micromamba as RCC replacement | ||
| Date | Dec 5, 2025 | ||
| Level | Trivial Change | ||
| Class | New Feature | ||
| Compatibility | Compatible - no manual interaction needed | ||
| Checkmk versions & editions |
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Robotmk has previously relied on RCC to provide isolated execution environments for Robot Framework tests on test hosts.
RCC was long a proven open-source tool based internally on micromamba, which significantly reduced installation and configuration efforts for users. In November 2024, however, Robocorp announced that it would no longer continue RCC as an open-source project and would continue development as a proprietary product in the future. Even though the previously released open-source version (Apache licence) remains usable in theory, neither bug fixes nor new features or reliable further development can be expected in the long term.
To ensure continuity, maintainability and reliable quality of the Checkmk integration, Robotmk has therefore integrated its own, deliberately lean implementation based on micromamba. This new method is provided under the name "conda" and basically performs the same task as RCC: the automated creation and management of isolated Python environments on test hosts. For users, this means that environment creation continues to be fully automated – but now with open, transparent and actively maintained technology.
The existing "rcc" method will remain available for the time being for reasons of backward compatibility. However, it will be removed in the future once all users have switched to the new conda-based solution.
It is therefore recommended that new configurations be created exclusively with the "conda" method and that existing installations be converted step by step.
Note that some environments require additional commands.
Example: Playwright/BrowserLibrary needs an initalization step (rfbrowser init).
In RCC, this is defined as a post-install step in the conda.yaml file.
For example:
rccPostInstall:
- rfbrowser init # Initialize Playwright
micromamba does not implement this option inside the conda.yaml file.
Therefore, the new conda environment option described in this werk allows for specifying a Robotmk environment manifest (robotmk-setup.yaml) containing such post-install commands.
Please refer to the documentation for further details.