Setup check_mk

Check_MK is a monitoring solution which is originally based on Nagios. It has been extended with a nice web gui including a lot of new features which simplify the setup of a monitoring system. It is available as Enterprise edition and as RAW (Open Source) edition.

There is a limited english documentation available. https://mathias-kettner.de/checkmk.html

Steps to install and configure Check_MK on CentOS7:

Download CentOS7 image (minimal is sufficient) http://isoredirect.centos.org/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1511.iso

Install Centos following the standard documention. After you have successfull installed Centos login to the system using SSH.

 ssh root@centos7 

First install all available updates.

 yum update 

Second some packages are required to be able to install check_mk successfully.

 yum -y install epel-release yum makecache all yum -y install php-mcrypt 

Download fping (http://pkgs.repoforge.org/fping/?C=M;O=D) and install it:

 cd /root wget http://pkgs.repoforge.org/fping/fping-3.10-1.el7.rf.x86_64.rpm rpm -i fping*.rpm 

Furthermore it is required to change SELINUX.

 vi /etc/sysconfig/selinux 

 # This file controls the state of SELinux on the system. # SELINUX= can take one of these three values: # enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced. # permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing. # disabled - No SELinux policy is loaded. SELINUX=enforcing # SELINUXTYPE= can take one of three two values: # targeted - Targeted processes are protected, # minimum - Modification of targeted policy. Only selected processes are protected. # mls - Multi Level Security protection. SELINUXTYPE=targeted 

change to

 # This file controls the state of SELinux on the system. # SELINUX= can take one of these three values: # enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced. # permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing. # disabled - No SELinux policy is loaded. SELINUX=permissive # SELINUXTYPE= can take one of three two values: # targeted - Targeted processes are protected, # minimum - Modification of targeted policy. Only selected processes are protected. # mls - Multi Level Security protection. SELINUXTYPE=targeted 

Reboot the Centos machine to apply the new SELINUX settings.

 init 6 

Download check_mk RAW edition for CentOS7 and install it:

 https://mathias-kettner.de/support/1.2.6p16/check-mk-raw-1.2.6p16-el7-34.x86_64.rpm rpm -i check-mk-raw*.rpm 

After you have installed Check_MK you have to create your monitoring side. In this example I call it “internal”.

 omd create internal omd start internal 

Now you should be able to access check_mk using your browser http://centos7/internal. The last part of the URL is the name of the created side.

Login using the default credentials

 User: omdadmin Password: omd 

That’s all for the setup in part 2 I will describe how to configure ESXi or vCenter monitoring.