In this Aricle I want to show you the Nagios based monitoring solution check_mk. MK stands for Matthias Kettner and is the company that is developing and selling check_mk.

Monitoring, meaning the supervising of devices, allows you to permanently check certain values on devices. Values like the used up disk space, CPU Temperature or CPU Load.

For every check on every device you can define at what point a critical state has been reached and what action should then be taken. A common usecase is to generate an e-mail informing the admin about an issue.

Check_MK is available in den versions CRE , CEE und CME.

My articles will be based on the raw edition since it is open source and published under GNU GPL v2 license.

Installation

I want to show you the installation process on a freshly installed ubuntu server 16.04. 1) Select the packet for your linux distribution and download it using wget.

wget https://mathias-kettner.de/support/1.5.0p2/check-mk-raw-1.5.0p2_0.xenial_amd64.deb

Then install that package unsing dpgk.

dpkg -i check-mk-raw-1.5.0p2_0.xenial_amd64.deb

If you should run into issues check your /etc/apt/sources.list.

deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial main restricted universe deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial-security main restricted deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial-updates main restricted universe

Choose a sources list generator, edit your seources.list update your sources, upgrade your system and you should not have any issues with missing dependencies anymore.

[video width=“1162” height=“690” mp4=“https://blog.hackzenwerk.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/install-1.mp4”][/video]

OMD

The tool called Open Monitoring Distribution is installed alongside check_mk. It is used to make managing nagios and ist plugins a lot easier. Using the command omd create we now create a new site. I will call this site hackzenwerk.

omd create hackzenwerk

After you have created this site check_mk will generate an admin account called cmkadmin for you and displays the password. Write it down.

Now we need to start this site.

omd start hackzenwerk

Connecting to (port 80) IP/site you will see a check_mk login screen that you can login to using cmkadmin. In my case this means http://<IP>/hackzenwerk

The connection is still insecure so you should generate an ssl certificate.

If your check_mk is reachable over the internet you can generate a lets encrypt certificate. Since my testing system is not available from the internet I use a self-signed certificate.

Meldet euch dort mit den zuvor generierten Logindaten an und ihr landet in einer nackten Check_MK Verwaltungsoberfläche.

Cheers, Ori