Best Server & Application Monitor for free with Checkmk

Monitoring is an essential part of making sure self-hosted services are up and running and performance is as expected. Checkmk Raw edition provides a free and open source server & application monitor you can spin up in seconds in a Docker container.

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Introduction to monitoring - 0:00
Discussing the importance and benefits of monitoring - 0:53
Introduction to Checkmk free and open source solution - 1:54
Discussing the Checkmk Raw edition and installation options - 2:36
You can run it in a Docker container - 3:00
Difference between the Raw edition and Free edition - 3:30
How to deploy Checkmk using a Docker container - 4:42
Discussing the Docker command for the Checkmk container - 5:19
Running the Docker command - 5:52
Checking the Docker container - 6:10
Container logs show the initial password for Checkmk - 6:27
Discussing the next steps for configuration - 6:58
Logging into Checkmk web interface - 7:21
Adding a host monitoring rule for monitoring VMware - 7:35
Entering credentials and setting SSL checking - 7:58
Adding the vCenter Server as a host to monitor after setting up host rule - 8:18
Service discovery for the vSphere environment - 8:41
Accepting the services for monitoring VMware environment - 9:03
Committing changes in the environment - 9:19
Checkmk querying services for status and analytics - 9:39
Looking at the services and monitoring with Checkmk - 10:10
Perf-o-meter with Checkmk - 10:54
Looking at the cloud monitoring options - 11:11
Docker container host monitoring - 11:30
Monitoring for Docker hosts and metrics - 11:41
Wrapping up and talking about notifications, etc - 12:00

[brentlane]

Branden your a legend.your videos are always informative and fun for noobs.cheers ....

[Miscellaneous]

Thanks for your help, could not have asked for a better tutorial!

[billyrowe]

The licensing was confusing at first.
You are correct. The Raw version didn’t say anything about unlimited but it is.
CheckMK Raw is open source and self hosted.
CheckMK itself is different than Raw.
It is free for 25 hosts after 30 day trial.

[NikConwell]

Nice, thanks. I tried the free/enterprise appliance and it was able to talk to my single esxi host (no central vCenter). Looks like there's no raw version for the appliance so I'll probably redo things using the docker version so I can get onto the raw. Adding hosts initially wasn't intuitive, but your video was very helpful in figuring things out.

[chrisumali]

thanks for the demo and info, have a great day

[hovasty]

Oh my god you look like Chris Stuckmann that was the reason I clicked on the video lol. But nice content and you have new subscriber.

[ryanw]

Nagios/CheckMK/Opsview/etc are OK. Zabbix really opened my eyes with how much better their detection and trigger system is.

[cybr]

Nice video, I remember you mentioning HashiCorp Vault in one of your videos. Do you use it in your homelab? If so, would you ever make a video about it? There actually aren't that many videos about how to configure it on docker

[seths]

Checkmk is based on nagios - which I've been using for some 15+ years and am happy with. nice though they have a container. tried nagios xi but found that i worked better editing config files manually after being so used to core

[ndymcfly]

Nice video! A question, it's compatible with Oracle Cloud instances? Thanks!

[bobsodman]

@8:06 You should mention adding an explicit host argument otherwise this rule will apply to all hosts you attempt to add. Took me a day of troubleshooting to figure out what was wrong.

[iiyii]

Check_mk is just an overlay for nagios. You can also simply run standard nagios as well. Personally i think icinga2 is much nicer as it's got all the same capabilities under the hood but seems to be much less resource intensive than check_mk, nagios, and nagios xi.

[screamingiraffe]

Enjoyed the video but seems to be missing the DB store component. Monitoring systems need to store the data somewhere which includes storage maintenance. A very key component to any monitoring server/service. Perhaps this concern is outside the scope of the video, but I felt that it should have been covered at least briefly

[olfino]

I love Checkmk, easy installation, autodiscovery... Way smoother and more complete than nagios, zabbix, Prtg...

[mikekonowaluk]

I tried this with 2.0 but I couldnt figure out how to monitor Unraid with it. Has anyone come up with a plugin for it? I also now get an error saying cant create user when I look at the logs.

[trini]

solarwinds is what i use...but for free you should try observium

[getoverhere]

Can this detect any documents that have been updated on server.

[JoseBertoSanchez]

@VirtualizationHowTo ----> Do you know if CheckMK integrate with Graphana?

[andreas_tech]

Hi,

can I install checkmk after I have the whole stack up & running (running website)?!

Thank you

[Squash_Man]

Would be nice to see a comparison with Zabbix.