Checkmk Reviews

Sometimes we receive alerts, and it can become annoying when you acknowledge an alert. It is very clunky when you acknowledge the alert. The process is not very intuitive, and there are instances where it feels a bit cumbersome to acknowledge an alert. I think this aspect could be enhanced, along with the functionality of the local checks. I need to better understand how to clear an alert, especially when you're focused on a task and just need to acknowledge it. Currently, it requires clicking through a lot of buttons to acknowledge and dismiss the alert. Therefore, it would be beneficial to have a more user-friendly approach to this process. Apart from these considerations, the system is highly effective. Nevertheless, there is a certain learning curve involved in mastering its usage. For new users, it might not be immediately straightforward, and they might find it quite challenging to navigate initially. It could be helpful for them to streamline the onboarding experience and make the transition more seamless. The interface itself could use some refinement to ensure that it makes more logical sense, as there are numerous buttons and functions that can feel overwhelming. Therefore, a more coherent and user-friendly interface could greatly enhance the overall usability of the system. At the moment, the suite requires the installation of agents on each individual host. So, in future releases, it would be good if there could be an option for an agent-less platform, eliminating the need to install agents on every single server. This would simplify the process and reduce the overhead of managing agent installations across multiple servers.

The main room for improvement is in the solution's presentation and the integration area. In our company, we use the integration capabilities from ServiceNow. We also have another big monitoring solution in place in our company, which is Dynatrace. At the moment, there doesn't exist an out-of-the-box integration for Dynatrace. I think that the integration and the exporting of the data collected are areas where Checkmk lacks but should try to improve the most. The only implementation of Checkmk that allows high availability is the virtual appliance that has the option for the availability of a different box. Otherwise, you have to find a way to implement it manually with some custom solution, which could be an improvement.

We have integrated the product with our Slack channel, which has proven to be highly beneficial. This setup ensures that we receive immediate notifications on Slack whenever a service experiences downtime. These alerts allow us to track and analyze the downtime trends effectively, aided by the product's graphical representation of trends spanning the previous 400 days. Our use of the product extends to monitoring multiple sites. Additionally, we've implemented various scripts within the solution to automate tasks. For instance, we utilize it to schedule and execute manual scripts for data copying and running backups at intervals of five to ten minutes. This approach ensures seamless data synchronization. All in all, Checkmk stands out as an exceptionally valuable tool for our operations.