Checkmk

Checkmk is infrastructure and network monitoring software for IT teams, with an open source Community edition, self-hosted paid editions and a SaaS option.

Checkmk tells an IT team when a server, switch, cloud service, container or application stops behaving, so problems are fixed before they turn into outages. It covers cloud and on-premises systems from a single platform, which lets one console take the place of several separate monitoring tools. Checkmk GmbH develops it in Munich and shipped the first release in 2012. The Community edition is open source, and the commercial editions extend that same core. Automated discovery finds hosts and services across servers, networks, storage, cloud and containers, and the Agent Bakery manages agents centrally. Network devices are polled over SNMP, the Event Console takes in syslog messages and SNMP traps, and topology maps are built from CDP and LLDP. Kubernetes monitoring reaches from the cluster down to individual pods, while Prometheus exporters and OpenTelemetry data feed the same view. Built-in dashboards, a dashboard builder, predictive thresholds and scheduled SLA reports turn the readings into alerts and reports. Synthetic Monitoring tests web and desktop applications from the user's side, and Explain with AI turns an alert into a root cause summary. The Community edition suits small infrastructures and personal projects. Pro is aimed at growing enterprises with data center infrastructure, while Ultimate adds multi-tenancy and data segregation for multinationals and managed service providers. Cloud is the SaaS edition for teams that prefer not to run the monitoring server themselves, and it needs no inbound traffic into their network. The self-hosted editions run on Linux, in Docker or on Checkmk's virtual and hardware appliances, including fully air-gapped sites with strict security rules. An operations team typically uses Checkmk to watch a hybrid estate of physical servers, virtual machines and AWS, Azure or Google Cloud accounts from one place. When a check turns critical, the alert reaches the on-call engineer in PagerDuty or a channel in Slack or Microsoft Teams, and a ticket can open in ServiceNow or Jira. Network teams rely on it to track traffic and errors on switch and router interfaces across branch sites. The Checkmk MCP server gives an AI assistant read-only access to live monitoring data. Managed service providers run one installation for many customers, keeping each customer's data, views and reports apart.