As a system administrator, you want to know the health status of your infrastructure. You want to be aware of disk failure, memory issues, and other server-related problems before your users know. For that, you’ll need robust system health monitoring and maintenance software. If you need a robust, yet simple install and manage monitoring platform, then Checkmark is a great place to start. Checkmk is a self-contained software suite that combines Nagios with add-ons for gathering, and monitoring and comes with a web portal interface for simple management. This is Nagios with enhanced features and add-ons that you might not find with the original Nagios monitoring platform. For more about Checkmk, please visit its homepage. When you’re ready to install Checkmk on Ubuntu, follow the steps below:

Install Checkmk

To use the Checkmk monitoring platform, you must first install it. The good thing is, it has a.DEB package that you can easily install on Ubuntu. To update Ubuntu, use the commands below: After updating Ubuntu, you may want to reboot.

Download and Install Checkmk

Now that Ubuntu is updated, run the commands below to download the Checkmk package and install it. On the download page with all the latest packages, visit this location. You can simply run the commands below to get Checkmk installed. The commands above will download and install Checkmk packages, including all dependencies and Apache2 which is used to provide a web interface for its monitoring platform. After installing, run the commands below to display its command help commands and options. That should display similar lines as shown below: After installing, continue below to create a Checkmk monitoring instance.

Create Checkmk Monitoring Instance

When you’re done installing Checkmk, run the commands below to create your first Checkmk instance. Checkmk uses the concept of instances, or individual installations, to isolate multiple Checkmk copies on a server. To create your first instance, run the commands below: For this tutorial, we’re going to call our first instance monsvrs. That should create an instance called monsvrs. After creating the instance, it should output a message similar to the one below: You’ll find a URL to access the instance portal, along with the default password to access. Now run the commands below to start the instance created above. After the instance is successfully started, it should output similar lines: Now you can go and access the portal and log in with the default password provided above. http://sever-name/monsrvs Log in and begin setting up your environment. Now that the server is installed, you can focus on installing the client agent on the computers you want to monitor.

Install Checkmk Agent

You can quickly and easily get the client agent from the instance you created above. Just specify the server name with the instance name as shown with the commands below: To install the Check agent on the machine, use the commands below: After installing the agent, run the commands below: That should output similar lines as below: Now that the agent is installed on the host, go to the server instance and add a new host agent. To do that, go to the Hosts menu in the WATO – Configuration menu on the left. From here click Create new host.  You will be asked for some info about the host you want to add. After a few scans, the host should be added and ready to be monitored. That’s it! Conclusion: This post showed you how to install and configure the Checkmk system monitoring platform on Ubuntu. If you find any error above, please use the comment form below to report it. Thanks, You may also like the post below: