# Checkmk Reviews 2026. Verified Reviews, Pros & Cons | Capterra > Is Checkmk the right Network Monitoring solution for you? Explore 35 verified user reviews from people in industries like yours to make a confident choice. Source: https://www.capterra.com/p/181692/Check-MK/reviews --- Checkmk 4.7 (35) [View alternatives](https://www.capterra.com/p/181692/Check-MK/alternatives/) Provider data verified by our Software Research team, and reviews moderated by our Reviews Verification team. [Learn more](https://www.capterra.com/our-story/) * * * Last updated April 28th, 2026 # Reviews of Checkmk Ease of use 4.2 Customer Service 4.4 ## Pros and Cons in Reviews EN Eduard N SO MonitoringAutomotive, 10,001+ employeesUsed the software for: More than 2 years. “Checkmk is an easy-to-set-up monitoring tool with good support and a great community.“ June 12, 2024 André L Systems AdministratorsChemicals, 501 - 1,000 employeesUsed the software for: 6-12 months. “Easy to use, even if you do not have so many knowledge on Linux, the GUI is very intuitive, one of the things which I most like on this software, is the possibility to choose any thing you want to monitoring: a service, a query, a job, or you can customize and create your own template choosing what you want to monitoring, according to your environment.“ May 31, 2021 AH Adam H IT ManagerInternet, 11 - 50 employeesUsed the software for: Less than 6 months. “Rapidly develop passive and active checks in python is incredibly handy and has allowed us to standardise our monitoring plugins.“ May 15, 2020 ## Showing most helpful reviews Showing 1-25 of 35 Reviews Sort by: Most Helpful Rating Company Size Reviewer's Role Length of Use Frequency of Use Michael F. Supervisor Global Monitoring Architecture Automotive Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Best monitoring solution you can find on the market." March 8, 2019 5.0 We deliver in a sequenced order in short interval parts to our customer (JIT/JIS). The IT systems are crucial in the supply chain to the customer. With check\_mk we are able to alert an issue with this IT systems before it becomes a problem for the delivery process. check\_mk is used in a highly distributed way at over 300 sites with one central configuration platform which allow us to quickly implement new monitoring solutions and standards. Pros check\_mk is a very intuitive, easy to use and easy to setup monitoring system. It scales perfect vertically and also horizontal. it provides already a huge amount of monitoring functionalities for a lot of environments and it is quite simple extensible with own functionalities. Beside state based monitoring it has also a complete solution to integrate event based monitoring. With the Business Intelligence we are able to picture our mission critical processes in monitoring and able to simulate the impact of outages to the business. Cons The design of the front-end is a bit vintage style and is in hour highly distributed implementation somehow slow. Review Source MC Max C. Network Design Consultant Higher Education Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Check\_MK as a single pane of glass" May 26, 2020 5.0 Providing infrastructure monitoring to everyone involved in IT provision, whatever their level of technical knowledge. I did the initial deployment, and then sold the product to the rest of the team managing the infrastructure. I found it easy to set up, and to import an initial set of hosts, and fairly simple to explain to others. Pros We are using the Raw Edition, monitoring over 7000 services on nearly 400 hosts. Although we have another product for monitoring switches and routers, we have integrated status updates from that product into the Check\_MK view, so we have a single pane of glass. Almost every aspect of the software can be configured through a web page. It's relatively easy to extend and even modify the supplied checks, and if you do, you don't prevent future upgrades, because the upgrade process supports merging of modifications. The agents are read-only, so inherently more secure, and pretty simple to install. The BI feature enables us to provide monitoring of the business services people actually use, as well as the underlying infrastructure. When there are failures, you can drill down to see which component actually failed, and when. The automatic generation of graphs makes it easy to do trend analysis. Cons I didn't find it easy to understand the way to use tags. The difference between maintenance windows on hosts and those on services is also not obvious, and similarly acknowledgements on hosts and on services. But these are minor issues. Alternatives considered [Icinga](https://www.capterra.com/p/163153/Icinga/) Reason for choosing Checkmk Much easier to configure, and similar or better web monitoring Switched from [Servers Alive](https://www.capterra.com/p/130128/Servers-Alive/) That product had not been maintained much for a long time, and it was clear that it needed replacement. I spent several months looking at a number of products that would fit our budget (hardware: reused; software: zero) and Check\_MK was by far the best I saw. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Service Desk Engineer Consumer Goods Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "Best Budget monitoring software, but you get what you pay for" January 30, 2019 3.0 It's free, so that's great. You will sink more time into it to get it running as you like compared to other slicker monitoring programs, it's up to you if that's a fair trade off. Pros Lots of features and customization, very affordable Cons Overwhelming amount of options that aren't that well organized or explained, tricky to manage services and hosts Review Source CL Constantin L. Teamleiter IT-Services Hospital & Health Care Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Outstanding Customize, Scale & Performance vs. easy of use" March 29, 2020 4.0 We use Check\_MK to 24x7 monitor our IT-Infrastructure from bare metal devices, the network, to our apllications which are hosted onpremis and in the cloud. The monitoring is very stable and performant. We use aswell the BI features to build dependency trees to make the availablility of single applications/IT-Services visible for all our users and the management. In that case we make use of the API to integrate those numbers in our Intranet and existing Management dashboards. We picked Check\_MK because we liked the many integration possibilties and becase it scales. Pros We liked the thousend of customizing possibilities to build the monitoring for our needs. Another plus is that CMK comes with a lot of checks for different devices included so you can monitor the most things right away. The new Business Intelligence "module" and the Reporting features is awesome :-) There is a free & paid version available, so you can start free and upgrade if you need more features. The new and automatically generated Network Topology is very nice Cons \- Finding the correct ruleset to tune the values for a check is sometimes not that easy :-) - Handling in general and the UI could be more intuitive/easier - Troubleshooting is sometimes not easy, and requieres you to be aware of the commandline of cmk and the correct paths to check the logs. (What about a cool Log overview directly in the Web UI? And a log bundle collector to report issues in the forum/support.) Alternatives considered [PRTG](https://www.capterra.com/p/21581/PRTG-Network-Monitor/) Reason for choosing Checkmk \- More Flexibility - Better scaling with Rulesets Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Systems Engineer III Logistics and Supply Chain Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "Excellent product that lacks in documentation and examples" October 22, 2019 5.0 Overall the application looks good. Not so much of a learning curve if you’re moving away from Nagios like I am. Pros Best bang for your buck. Constantly updated to include new features, enhancements, bug and security fixes. Active community that is very helpful. Cons Documentation and examples are lacking though it does look like they are trying to catch up. Conferences only seem to be in Europe. Alternatives considered [Zabbix](https://www.capterra.com/p/135902/Zabbix-Monitoring-Solution/) Reason for choosing Checkmk Easier to use than Zabbix. Zabbix didn’t have the temporary alarm suppression like check\_mk does. Switched from [Nagios Core](https://www.capterra.com/p/152751/Nagios-Core/) Nagios couldn’t provide a feature to temporarily acknowledge alarms for a specific amount of time. Review Source AH Adam H. IT Manager Internet Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "Fanastic monitoring tool - nagios replacement" May 15, 2020 5.0 We use CheckMK Raw Edition to monitor an extensive range of networking devices (routers, switches, UTMs, wireless APs, wireless point-to-point links), servers (Hyper-V, Windows and Linux), associated networked equipment (power rails, UPSs), VOIP devices including PBXs and applications. This covers approximately 400 network devices, 200 servers and 10 or so internal applications. The internal applications are monitored for uptime and availability and have customised checks to graph and monitor individual aspects of their performance. Pros Rapidly develop passive and active checks in python is incredibly handy and has allowed us to standardise our monitoring plugins. Being able to reuse nagios plugins has helped in this migration. Customisable dashboards have been very useful. Integration with automated configuration has been straight-forward. Cons Not many so far - the documentation has been limited in some areas but did not impede our ability to implement checks in the way we wanted. We are waiting on the 1.7 release to more fully utilise the API. Switched from [Nagios Core](https://www.capterra.com/p/152751/Nagios-Core/) Required additional features and capabilities. Customisable dashboards and a more modern interface. Review Source EN Eduard N. SO Monitoring Automotive Used the software for: 2+ years ### "A continuously improving monitoring tool" June 12, 2024 5.0 Checkmk is an easy-to-set-up monitoring tool with good support and a great community. It's worth staying up to date. Pros What I like about checkmk is its continuous development. New features are constantly being added. Not only does it keep up with the times and monitor current technologies, but the developments for individual customers are available to everyone. This has led to a somewhat overloaded product, which, however, has become much simpler and more user-friendly again since version 2.0.0 at the latest. Cons Users with little experience are often overwhelmed, and error messages can be misleading without deeper analysis. Review Source Response from tribe29 July 15, 2024 Dear Eduard, Thank you for your positive feedback! We are glad to hear that you support the direction we are taking with Checkmk. We strive to create a product that works best for our users. If you’d like to help us in this endeavor, please consider subscribing to our UX Research mailing list to learn about opportunities to shape Checkmk’s future: https://lists.checkmk.com/mailman3/postorius/lists/ux-research.lists.checkmk.com/ Best regards, Your Checkmk Team. Marius P. CEO & Founder Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Best in-class IT Monitoring software" January 12, 2019 5.0 With Check\_MK we have visibility and insight into the systems and applications that power our business. We know the lifecycle and usage patterns of our systems thanks to Check\_MK and this is really a powerful feature when making important business decisions regarding these systems. We do not have to do guess work, it is a matter of pulling up the right view or generating the report and looking at the details. We have gained agility and gained operations performances by using Check\_MK. In time it has showed to us usage patterns we were not aware of from that helped us fine-tune and optimise thereby reducing complexity/costs or both, it has provided us with instant fault-management and helped identify issues before they become critical as well as historical and trending information that help us budget and plan. Pros The software is very pragmatic and provides instant results. With Check\_MK you get a solution that is focused on providing the absolute best in monitoring without getting bogged down into maintaining the solution or constantly tuning to keep it running. Cons There is nothing that comes to mind. The product does a wonderful job for what it is intended. Review Source André L. Systems Administrators Chemicals Used the software for: 6-12 months ### "Affordable, customizable and easy to use solution" May 31, 2021 5.0 Easy to use, even if you do not have so many knowledge on Linux, the GUI is very intuitive, one of the things which I most like on this software, is the possibility to choose any thing you want to monitoring: a service, a query, a job, or you can customize and create your own template choosing what you want to monitoring, according to your environment. Last but not least: the price, compared to the other peers is very fair. Pros The price of the product is pretty fair, I can say cheap of we analyze all the features which it provides. The software is able to monitoring since a simple Linux file server, to an Active Directory, Database server, it works either on Windows or Linux. Cons I do not have cons about the software, the only observation, you need to have a little knowledge on open-source\\Linux\\Unix plataforms to customize it better. Reason for choosing Checkmk The price, the customization options, it gave us more flexibility on the business plataform, because none of the operation companies are equal. Review Source Christian M. Senior Consultant Computer & Network Security Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Most powerful monitoring solution" December 17, 2018 5.0 We have only good experiences with Check\_MK. We use it in large environment without any issues. We like the huge community of Check\_MK. Pros The distributed setup in large scale environments. The easy install and configuration via Web Interface. Interfacing to other products like Grafana or i-Doit. Powerfull API for automation. The Rule based configuration is powerful very fast. Cons There are too many options to configure Check\_MK. Review Source TM Thomas M. Product Owner Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Powerful tool with great support" February 18, 2019 5.0 Pros Check\_MK gives us all we need to monitor our server landscape. It's very stable and we did not notice major problems. It comes with a lot of useful graphs displaying current and historical data. It provides a business intelligence like feature, notofications, an event console and much more Cons Sometimes one might lose overview as the menus are quite "crowded" Review Source CK Christian K. Administrator Hospital & Health Care Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "Top monitoring SW" April 29, 2019 5.0 Pros The flexibility and the fine tuning possibilities Cons The difficulty to get into it. The user manual online is not complete. Review Source US Uwe S. Admin Civic & Social Organization Used the software for: 6-12 months ### "Checkmk - Monitoring für die Client- und Serverüberwachung" December 17, 2024 5.0 Wir setzen es als Monitoring Plattform ein um unseren Host und ca. 15 VMs zu überwachen. Pros Sehr mächtige Möglichkeiten der Konfiguration. Tolles Monitoring, dass keine Wünsche offen lässt. Cons Es wirkt in der Oberfläche ein wenig "Old fashioned", was aber der Funktionalität nicht schadet. Review Source Response from tribe29 January 7, 2025 Es freut uns sehr, dass Sie die Funktionalität von Checkmk nützlich finden. Wir arbeiten im Moment an Verbesserungen der Benutzeroberfläche und hoffen, dass Ihnen diese gefallen werden! Mit besten Grüßen, Ihr Checkmk-Team JR Jerome R. Database admin Food & Beverages Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Checkmk is a great monitoring tool" June 12, 2024 4.0 Pros Ease of use and the possibility to monitor everything Cons How you have to configure the notifications Review Source Response from tribe29 July 15, 2024 Dear Jerome, Thank you for your feedback. We are delighted to hear that you find Checkmk easy to use and efficient. Regarding the notifications, we are actively working on improving this aspect of the user experience and hope to present a better way of configuring them in the next release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO6yWj\_WQFs. You can help us shape these changes by filling out this form - https://app.useberry.com/t/joeggSeM6ZH6hV/ - by August 31, 2024, so our UX team can contact you. Thank you again for your valuable feedback. Best regards, The Checkmk Team SM Simon M. IT-Consultant Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "One of the best monitoring tools on the market" March 8, 2020 4.0 Having an overview over your IT-infrastructure 24x7, recognizing misconfiguration/misbehaviour before it becomes a real problem (predictive monitoring). Being able to automate many tasks to save a lot of time with the configuration via API or through other configuration management systems (eg. I use puppet to keep the agent and the plugins up-to-date all the time). The possibilites to notify yourself, customers, co-workers, etc. are endless and also very flexible. Pros Many devices can be monitored out-of-the-box because of the discovery feature of the tool. The software is easily extensible with your own scripts or check-plugins from other monitoring tools like Nagios, Icinga, Zabbix, etc. There wasn't a single device that I couldn't somehow monitor with at least a basic set of checks like the SNMP hr-MIBs. The passive checks of the agent are still one of the most appreciated features of the software. Cons The active check plugins from Ethan Galstad/Nagios written in C which are still being used widely, eg. check\_dns could need a make-over in python (like all the native ones are), because they are either not working the way they should (eg. check\_dns reports the time of it's own process, rather than the time the dns answer took) and are missing features (eg. check\_dns has no clue about DNSSEC). Some of the enterprise features like the Reporting (especially PDF export functionality) should be ported over to the open-source variant (Raw Edition) of the software to be able to compete with other FOSS tools on the market. Reason for choosing Checkmk \- Ease of administration (through WATO), especially for users that don't have deep linux/programming knowledge - Many features work out-of-the-box and don't need initial configuration - The ability to extend your setup with Distributed Monitoring, keeping configuration still in one place - Being able to keep track of changes being made through git, especially when many people are working parallely - Great user community, helping a lot of customers free of charge through mailing lists or nowadays forum Review Source RR Ricardo R. Partner Information Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Always the tool that saves the day" June 21, 2023 5.0 I've been using checkmk for at least 12 years and there is nothing that I couldn't deliver. It's flexibility and extended community always there for you. Pros The capacity and hability that gives you to easily adapt to your own scenario Cons Actually there is nothing that I can recall. Review Source NK Norman K. IT specialist - system integration Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "The perfect monitoring solution for small, mid-sized, big and huge infrastuctures" March 6, 2020 5.0 Checkmk offers a whole monitoring framework that you can use to monitor like everything out there. With the help of the ~1800 check plugins and the ability to write your own checks you can monitor whatever you want. The amount of abilitys to do things like sending out notifications, configuration etc. are huge. Checkmk offers a steep learning curve and the benefits you're getting from it are great and I personally learned a lots of new things with the help of Checkmk. The insights you're getting from it are great and help to resolve problems even before they are real problems. One of the greatest things is the opensource edition (RAW Edition) of Checkmk. The ability to contribute your own code to the final product is great. I'm working with Checkmk everyday and used almost every type they're offering (CME,CEE,RAW, virt. Appliance). I'm consulting companys in monitoring projects and my company is part of the Checkmk Partner Programm. I only had good experiences with the Checkmk Team. Pros The ability to monitor almost every device with small to little effort is great. (Out-of-the-box) The rule based configuration is one of the key features why Checkmk is superior. Performance is great, even in bigger setups (>2000 hosts). Distributed Monitoring and the ability for managed services helps a lot. Thridparty Integration is great, thanks to the open source community. You're not forced to a cloud (SaaS). All your sensitive data is stored local and you have the power over it. You're able to build your monitoring dynamic from the ground up and Checkmk helps to improve the overall quality of your infrastructure. Cons It takes some time to get used to the GUI because of the vast amount of features. Review Source CR Christian R. Network Engineer Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing Used the software for: 2+ years ### "A flexible and extendable monitoring solution" March 26, 2020 5.0 We are using the Checkmk Enterprise Edition to monitor our infrastructure with around 500 hosts (Linux, Windows, Cisco, Barracuda Firewalls, VMware, Surveillance cameras, Building Access Control Systems). The hosts are located in different sites in Germany and India. This year we are starting to monitor our user endpoints (Windows and Linux) too. We wanted to gain a better insight in which system run which OS version and patch level, hardware health, and which systems are offline for long periods of time. This works very well for us with Checkmk. Pros "If you can script it, you can do it!" I really like the ability to customize nearly everything so that the software exactly fits your needs. You can create your own checks so you can monitor custom applications or odd use cases. Checkmk offers a nice API so you can automate host creation, create your own little helper tools and much more. Cons The documentation lacks depth on some topics but it is getting better. When you start to use Checkmk for the first time the learning curve is a bit steep, but you get reward with a sheer endless amount of possibilities when you take time to learn. Review Source MS Moritz S. Unix Systems Administrator Higher Education Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Nagios with a twist" March 5, 2020 4.0 We are using the Checkmk Raw Edition since 1.2.something to monitor ~500 hosts (mostly Linux VMs, but some are Windows and some are actual hardware, too). Many of those run web applications which we try to monitor using active HTTP checks, too. Some specific monitoring of Docker and Kubernetes components is also used. Pros There are tons of features: Using Checkmk allows us to monitor basic aspects about our systems rapidly using the included host agent and server side check evaluation. Additional active checks that require more domain knowledge can be easily configured using the web interface. Compared to the plain text file configuration mess that is Nagios, this is absolutely futuristic. Cons Due to the huge complexity of the configuration framework, it is sometimes hard to find the right location for settings and rules, but as you get more familiar with the design of the system it gets easier. Review Source BH Bernd H. IT Consultant Biotechnology Used the software for: 2+ years ### "One tool for monitoring "almost" anything" March 10, 2020 4.0 Here a short system overview what we do with the Enterprise Version Monitoring of about 150K services such as - SNMP devices - Server Linux / Windows / AIX - SAP - diverse applications - Tracking of deliveries (trains & ships) - Tracking of large vehicles for maintenance - Control and monitoring of the building services engineering - Automatic ticket handling in the ServiceNow - Alerts ... and a thousand other things Pros What I like best: - very steep learning curve - conclusive operation - very easy to define hosts and service even for beginners - very good support (Comunity & Enterprise) - more than 1700 plugins "out of the box - in the community version for free - Price performance ratio in the Enterprise Edition very good - most of the configuration can be done via the GUI with the additional option to do it on the console Cons I can't think of a great thing that is constantly and actively improving the system. Review Source RP Ralf P. Manager Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "cmk in daily use" June 20, 2023 5.0 great product Pros Opensource faire, works reliability, helps to avoid problems and saves money Cons BI to difficult to configure, make it easy with assistants Review Source RA Rolf A. Manager Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Enterprise grade monitoring as it should be" January 6, 2019 5.0 \- component based state monitoring: -- all kind of servers (real, virtual; Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, ESX, AS400...) -- all kind of network devices and appliances -- full stack - component based event monitoring - monitoring of business processes by using the Check\_MK business intelligence - alarming via e-mails, ticketing tools, umbrella managers, SMS etc. Pros \- Very fast and easy implementation - Incredible low costs - Very close communication with and fast feedback from the company behind Check\_MK - Almost complete API set for all automations need for an enterprise sized infrastructure - Highly customisable, flexible and extensible by several plugin mechanisms - A vast set of monitors already shipped with the product - A very secure architecture - A limit footprint on the monitored servers and devices - No Java, no application server needed to run the product - Much more, you have to experience Check\_MK Cons To cut a long story short: to my and all of my customers opinions there is nothing to criticise. Review Source FS Felix S. IT-Administrator Research Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Perfect monitoring for heterogenous IT environments" February 27, 2019 5.0 Monitoring complex heterogeneous IT environments and capacit management. Pros The best thing about check\_mk is its ability to monitor all sorts of operating systems, appliances and applications in one central place. Combined with custom checks and performance data we are using it for monitoring as well as capacity management. The compatability to nagios and it's huge plugin repository made migration from classical nagios to check\_mk very easy. We have been using check\_mk for 5 years and are not planning to change that in the future. Cons The menu structure is unintuitive in some cases and the Web API does not make use of HTTP response codes (You get a 200 even if the call fails). The Agent output is not encrypted by default. Review Source GS Gerd S. Teamlead Monitoring Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Complete monitoring for IT infrastructure of any size" January 15, 2019 5.0 We are monitoring IT infrastructure from UPSs over servers, hypervisors, network, SAN and NAS storage up to the operating systems and databases as well as SAP for over 80 customers with Check MK and have made excellent experiences with the tool, the technical support and also the user community. Pros Automates many formerly cumbersome tasks like the discovery of hosts and services (both agent based and snmp or proprietary APIs) Offers a free open source version that packs the same checks as the enterprise version. 1700 checks for free is pretty sweet. The whole system is extremely lightweight, 4 CPUs and 4 GB memory are more than enough for medium sized environments (~200-300 hosts). Since it's open source you can always extend the system or look into the code to find out what it does on the most detailed level. Cons The available documentation on the website is sometimes outdated or incomplete (they are however aware of this and have made it a priority for 2019) Review Source TW Thomas W. System Engineer Consumer Goods Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "One product to rule them all :-) Checkmk CEE" March 9, 2020 5.0 We monitor our whole store infrastructure: all Media Märkte all Saturns over Europe all Datacenters Frankfurt & Ingolstadt including: Nutanix, VMware, Windows, Cisco network devices, Linux ..... All in all >21500 hosts with >162000 services and counting All centralized from Frankfurt (WAN reaches to Portugal in the West to Turkey in the East) Pros Scalability & the sheer amount of check plugins already shipped! Cons That the ability to assign contact groupts to LDAP connections was removed. Bring it back please Alternatives considered [PRTG](https://www.capterra.com/p/21581/PRTG-Network-Monitor/) Reason for choosing Checkmk Scalability and pricing Review Source Similar Products Featured ## Related categories [Server Monitoring](https://www.capterra.com/server-monitoring-software/)[IoT](https://www.capterra.com/iot-software/)[Server Management](https://www.capterra.com/server-management-software/) ## Send me user reviews about this product ### Fill out the form and we'll send a list of the top-rated software based on real user reviews directly to your inbox.