Werk #18904: Synthetic Monitoring: Introduce micromamba as alternative to RCC
| Component | Checks & agents | ||
| Title | Synthetic Monitoring: Introduce micromamba as alternative to RCC | ||
| Date | Dec 5, 2025 | ||
| Level | Trivial Change | ||
| Class | New Feature | ||
| Compatibility | Compatible - no manual interaction needed | ||
| Checkmk versions & editions |
|
Robotmk has previously relied on RCC to provide isolated execution environments for Robot Framework tests on test hosts.
RCC is a proven open-source tool based internally on micromamba, which significantly reduces 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, neither bug fixes nor new features or reliable further development can be expected in the long term.
To provide an additional option going forward, Robotmk now offers 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.
Both the existing "rcc" method and the new "conda" method are fully supported. Users can choose whichever method best fits their needs.
Note that some environments require additional commands.
Example: Playwright/BrowserLibrary needs an initialization 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.