Checkmk Extends its Server-Room Strengths into Clouds, Containers, and Network Flow Monitoring

New Checkmk 2.0 release builds on strong demand with improved user experience, expanded support for cloud and container environments, and performance optimizations.

MUNICH – March 9, 2021 – tribe29, the creators of Checkmk, today announced the most significant update to their all-in-one IT monitoring solution in the company’s history. This new release, Checkmk 2.0, adds powerful new capabilities that allow users to quickly and easily establish monitoring across applications, networks, services, and servers in distributed, heterogeneous environments.

First released 2008, Checkmk has rapidly gained tens of thousands of users – including more than half of the companies in the DAX30 and within US companies including Adobe, AT&T and Simplot. It is available through a range of free, open source and enterprise monitoring offerings designed for organizations of all sizes.

Checkmk’s popularity is largely due to the breadth of monitoring coverage that can be rapidly achieved through out-of-the-box autodiscovery of relevant services. Checkmk combines an unparalleled collection of over 1,900 official plugins together with backward compatibility with legacy Nagios plugins.

Checkmk 2.0 extends this breadth of coverage with new or improved plugins for public cloud services, Kubernetes, Proxmox, Nutanix, Jenkins, Jira, Graylog, Elasticsearch, Couchbase, RabbitMQ, Redis, MongoDB, and more. This coverage is taken further with a new Check API for simplifying the extension of Checkmk’s coverage into new or bespoke systems.

Checkmk 2.0 features a complete redesign of the user interface with advanced dashboarding used to simplify the initial user experience. New dashboards use updated vizualization to presented new users with an easily grokkable view of key monitoring metrics, while power users have a consistent path to drill down into substantial detail Checkmk offers.

For DevOps driven environments there are two new features to integrate with cloud and container tooling. The Prometheus integration provides the ability to integrate metrics from platforms such as Kubernetes by allowing Checkmk to surface the wealth of information that Prometheus provides, bridging the DevOps and data center gap. In addition, the new REST API allows platform engineers to integrate existing tooling, and create brand-new tools, by allowing the full range of Checkmk capabilities within a standardized API.

While Checkmk has always offered network device monitoring, integration with the popular ntop open source network flow monitoring solution allows users to analyse traffic flows and view what is happening on the network in detail directly in Checkmk. This provides a more powerful ‘single pane’ observability solution for tracing problems across application, compute and network activity.

Meanwhile, users of the Enterprise Edition will benefit from new performance optimizations in the Checkmk Micro Core (CMC).

“With Checkmk 2.0 we have delivered a wide range of new features, and made monitoring even easier to set up and use – even for newcomers to monitoring,” said Jan Justus, CEO of tribe29. “We have made many improvements in this release, including those that help users operate in cloud and container environments. At the same time, our optimization work means that the system is more efficient than ever.”

Checkmk 2.0 is available as free, open source and enterprise editions. All versions are now available for download at checkmk.com.

About tribe29 GmbH

As the developers of Checkmk, tribe29 delivers an optimal IT monitoring solution for tens of thousands of users worldwide. More than half of the DAX30 rely on Checkmk to ensure the availability of business-critical systems by automatically and promptly detecting, reporting and resolving issues.