The future of IT is hybrid. On-premises infrastructures and public cloud environments such as AWS, Azure and GCP are increasingly forming an integrated whole. As a result, modern monitoring must also be hybrid. To address this need, Checkmk GmbH introduced the Cloud Edition of its Checkmk monitoring solution today. Customers can use it to seamlessly and automatically monitor both their on-premises and public cloud environments and benefit from higher performance, robustness and security. Checkmk Cloud Edition is specifically designed for dynamic and cloud-based IT scenarios, such as monitoring managed cloud services (Kubernetes, databases, serverless functions). The Cloud Edition builds on the strengths and developments of the Enterprise Edition, which also receives numerous additional enhancements in today’s 2.2 release.
“Enterprises continue to run many of their workloads in their own data centers or with a hoster. And even as they migrate more of them to public cloud providers, the same IT organization will remain responsible for running and monitoring them. What companies and their IT departments need is a monitoring solution that can handle both worlds and accompany them on their cloud journey,” said Jan Justus, CEO of Checkmk. “Rather than building two different monitoring stacks, Checkmk’s new Cloud Edition allows organizations to comprehensively monitor both on-premises and cloud workloads.”
The Checkmk Cloud Edition
Designed specifically for monitoring cloud-native, dynamic workloads, the Checkmk Cloud Edition includes numerous newly developed extensions for monitoring and visualizing cloud services. For example, in addition to built-in cloud dashboards, the Cloud Edition includes monitoring plug-ins for the most popular AWS, Azure, and GCP services in the areas of virtual machines, networking, storage, databases, serverless functions, container management, caching, and more.
New and enhanced agents
The monitoring agents of the Cloud Edition have been extensively redesigned and improved and can now operate in push mode in addition to pull mode. In push mode, the agents autonomously send their measurement data to the Checkmk instances in the cloud. The advantage of this one-way, TLS-encrypted communication is its high level of security. It allows Checkmk to monitor servers whose network cannot be accessed by the monitoring solution, e.g. in a cloud-based configuration or in an isolated network.
Another new feature of the Cloud Edition monitoring agent is auto-registration. It automatically includes newly deployed VMs or servers in monitoring and detects the services to be monitored. The new feature keeps monitoring of dynamic cloud infrastructures up to date. It also enables mass rollouts and time-efficient maintenance of Checkmk in large environments.
Building on Kubernetes monitoring introduced last year, Cloud Edition now natively supports monitoring of OpenShift clusters as well as managed Kubernetes solutions from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. In addition to Kubernetes solutions from cloud hyperscalers, Red Hat’s OpenShift is one of the most important and widely used Kubernetes distributions. OpenShift is also a cornerstone of the hybrid world for which Checkmk has developed the Cloud Edition.
This also reinforces the integration of Cloud Edition with Grafana Cloud. Checkmk will soon be listed as a data source in the official Grafana Plugin Store – allowing the Grafana Cloud plug-in to be integrated with Checkmk Cloud Edition sites. The existing support for Grafana in the Enterprise Edition will remain unaffected.
In addition, the Cloud Edition will be listed on the AWS and Azure marketplaces. This will enable rapid deployment of Checkmk in AWS and Azure environments. Furthermore, the Cloud Edition allows Checkmk data to be efficiently and securely stored in the cloud on AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage for backup.
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