Checkmk is a solution for IT Monitoring of servers,
applications, networks, cloud infrastructures (public, private, hybrid),
containers, storage, databases and environment sensors. It can be
deployed under all major Linux distributions or users can run it as Docker
container or virtual appliance on other operating systems including
Windows.
The tool is available as a Raw
Edition, which is open-source, and as an Enterprise Edition with a many
additional enterprise features. The…
$0
up to 10 systems
Veeam ONE
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Veeam ONE is virtualization management technology from Ohio based VMware partner Veeam Software.
In our organization which is a mash up of different hardware, software it was important to use an independent tool that wasn’t linked to one manufacturer incase a piece of hardware was dropped from support for example, we also value open-source software highly in our field. It’s important to in our IT environment to be able to customize and tweak software that we run. We don’t use the cloud monitoring aspect so Cannot comment on that side of the software.
Veeam One works great for monitoring virtual infrastructure. However, other dedicated server monitoring apps do better with monitoring the individual VMs. Where it stands out is its reporting functionality, which allows you to forecast growth and keep track of how you are using your resources. It is also great for companies without a big monitoring budget, as there is a pretty functional free version.
Proactive Alerting - the product can provide email alerts to notify one of any issues in the environment.
Capacity Planning and Forecasting - it has the ability to provide an analysis of the current environment as well as provide a report to forecast future capacity requirements.
Monitoring and Reporting - the software can monitor you environment 24x7 with the ability to provide comprehensive reporting.
Basically the products works very well and we have been very pleased, but following are some picky details I could suggest for improvement specific to our needs.
We leave the GUI up on a TV in our Office and on our desktops to visibly see if anything is alerting. It would be nice if you could customize the view to have a smaller minimum view with just the widgets you wanted.
When the GUI starts on a multi-monitor setup it always returns to the primary and any popup windows always go to the primary instead of the monitor you have the application running in.
Overall Checkmk is a great product that is made and ran by a European company that is open source and highly customizable, great support if needed. On prem support is a must for our organization which Checkmk supports. Our organization has been using Checkmk for over 5 years now Performance of the software runs excellent on its own Linux server, for any company with a good Linux admin, you can have a lot of un tweaking and creating custom checks for every aspect of your environment.
The software is a joy to use. The user interface is good overall and you can find frequently needed things easily and quickly. Some less frequently needed things eg. settings are hidden under several menus and one might have to look for those for a while. We also haven't had any issues with the products reliability.
Support, as mentioned earlier, is often slow to respond for Veeam ONE requests. To Veeam's credit, they will work on an issue until they find a solution, and will even develop a specific hotfix for your environment if one is needed, but response time is just slow.
We moved over to Checkmk from Nagios which felt like a natural evolution at the time as the raw version is based on Nagios, I vaguely not having any major issues moving over at the time. We still use the Raw version but we are planning to move to the enterprise version in the next 6 – 12 months as our needs expand.
Veeam One is very easy to use, easy to configure and get what you want. The integration for Veeam Backup is perfect, for today i think Veeam need to make Veeam One monitor Microsoft 365 envirioment, this will give great imput and integrated with Veeam Backup for 365 will be amezing.
The most valuable reports can safe us a lot of headaches and downtime. What used to be an emergency once in a while is an afterthought as we proactively prevent those same issues in less than 5 minutes a week.
The simplicity has allowed us to offload some virtual environment monitoring to a junior associate.
Initial deployment took some time because we couldn't get licensing figured out, but it has been smooth sailing since then.
