Checkmk - IT Infrastructure Monitoring

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Checkmk Raw Edition - Production-Ready IT Monitoring on AWS

Checkmk is a leading open source, self-hosted IT infrastructure and application monitoring platform. It watches hosts, services and metrics against thresholds, raises notifications, and renders everything in a full web GUI backed by a large built-in check catalog. This AMI delivers the 100% open source Checkmk Raw Edition (GPL-2.0) fully installed, hardened, and reverse-proxied behind apache2 with per-instance TLS, so your monitoring server is operational within minutes of launch - no manual package installation, no OMD site plumbing, and no TLS configuration required.

## Why This AMI Over a Manual Install

Unlike a bare Checkmk deployment, this image ships with:

• apache2 TLS reverse proxy pre-configured - the GUI is served over HTTPS on port 443 with a self-signed certificate that is regenerated uniquely on each instance; port 80 serves only a health endpoint and a redirect to HTTPS
• Dedicated data volume - the OMD site (/omd), including all monitoring configuration and RRD metric history, lives on a separately resizable EBS disk, not the root volume, so you can snapshot and scale storage independently
• No default credentials - the Checkmk installer prints a random cmkadmin password at site creation; that password is discarded and never shipped, and a fresh cmkadmin password is generated uniquely on each instance at first boot and written to /root/checkmk-credentials.txt
• Native systemd service management - Checkmk's own omd.service starts the monitoring site at boot; apache2 fronts it with TLS
• 24/7 cloudimg support included for deployment, upgrades, TLS termination, agent registration, and notification integrations

## Use Case: Ops Team Monitoring a Mixed Fleet

A platform team needs to monitor a fleet of Linux and Windows hosts, network devices and application endpoints from a single pane of glass, with threshold-based alerting and historical metric graphs. With this AMI they launch a single instance, sign in to the Checkmk GUI with the per-instance password, create an automation user, register their hosts with the Checkmk agent, run service discovery, and activate changes - building a full monitoring estate without standing up and wiring OMD by hand.

## Monitoring Capabilities

• Hosts and services: agent-based and agentless monitoring with automatic service discovery and a large built-in check catalog
• Metrics and graphs: RRD-backed performance data with real-time and historical graphs
• Notifications: flexible rule-based alerting by email and many third-party integrations
• REST API: a documented REST API for host and service automation using an automation user secret
• Dashboards and views: customizable dashboards, service problem views and availability reports

## Application Stack

Checkmk is packaged as an OMD (Open Monitoring Distribution) site named 'cmk', bundling the Nagios core, rrdcached, a site Apache and the agent receiver. The system apache2 reverse-proxies /cmk/ to the site and terminates TLS on port 443. All persistent site data resides on a dedicated EBS volume mounted at /omd that you can encrypt with AWS EBS encryption at rest and resize independently of the root volume.

## Security Posture

• No default administrator password ships in the image; cmkadmin is rotated to a unique per-instance secret at first boot
• The GUI is served only over TLS (HTTPS); plain HTTP returns a health check and redirects to HTTPS
• Security group opens SSH (22) and the TLS GUI (443); the monitored-agent port is not opened by default
• Data volume supports EBS encryption at rest
• Checkmk Raw Edition only (GPL-2.0) - no commercial or enterprise-licensed component is bundled

## Getting Started

1. Launch the AMI on a supported instance (m5.large or larger recommended)

2. Open port 443 in your security group

3. Retrieve the per-instance password: sudo cat /root/checkmk-credentials.txt

4. Browse to https:///cmk/ and sign in as cmkadmin

5. Create an automation user, register a host, run service discovery and activate changes

## cloudimg Support

24/7 technical support by email and live chat covers deployment, upgrades, TLS termination, agent registration, and notification integrations. Critical issues receive a one-hour average response.

This is a repackaged open source software product with additional charges for cloudimg support services. Checkmk is a trademark of Checkmk GmbH. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.