Setting up Check_MK – Part 1

I had the opportunity to try and use Check MK at my company. We are using OP5 now and when you compare there are advantages of both systems. However Check MK has many benefits in the gui and is in general easier to work with. So here I will try to explain all steps of setting this up and moving all my 200 hosts from OP5 to Check MK. There are some challenges when it comes to notifications and reporting but hopefully we will have something great when it is all done.

So first I looked at the different options I had.

Appliance

The appliance come in two flavours. The rail or the larger rack. Below is the rail

Virtual

Using a virtual image may be easy but if my ESX server is failing it may be better to use a real server.

My own server

I decided to use my own server. It will require some more Linux knowledge but has advantages as well.
Also I ordered the contract for 3000 services. I may have to change this later. You may also want to buy support but this can also be arranged later on.

Setting up my server

I decieded to get a IBM X3560 M5 server. It have 16Gb memory and two SSd disk so it should be more than enough. I installed an IMM module and mounted my iso. And installed all updates.

You could use any Linux dist you want. I will be using Ubuntu 14.04. I am also using IMM so the setup will be done from my desktop computer. So all I need is the ubuntu iso file mapped. The setup is done as usual with LAMP server installed.  As the server is going to monitor other hosts it should be as fault tolerant as possible. Apart from dual power supplies I did setup a bond interface. This enables the nic to serve on on address on two cables. To do this install:

sudo apt-get install ifenslave

Also make sure your etc/network/interfaces looks something like this:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto em0
iface em0 inet manual
bond-master bond0

auto em1
iface em1 inet manual
bond-master bond0

##### ADAPTER BONDING
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
address 10.1.10.90
netmask 255.255.255.0
dns-nameservers 10.1.10.10 10.1.10.11
dns-search white.se
gateway 10.1.10.1
bond-mode 4
bond-miimon 100
bond-lacp-rate 1
bond-slaves em0 em1

Restart server or networking.

Ok, Now it is time to install check MK. As you might know already there is an enterprise version I have used for OMD. This is updated far more often. Down load it from below or use the demoversion.

http://mathias-kettner.com/check_mk_download.php?HTML=yes&LANG=en

Put the file somewhere on your server. To be able to install you will first have to install gdebi.

sudo apt-get install gdebi

and

sudo gdebi check-mk-enterprise-1.2.6*

The installation process should be quit quick and set up everything. Now create your first site

sudo omd create mysite

You can now login to your site by going to http://myhostname/mysite and it should look like below. User is omdadmin and password omd.

There were one thing that annoyed me a little. I really wanted to be able just to go to the dns name without having to write /mysite.  I will get back to this later but you may want to create many sites. Especially for testing purposes. You could for example download the innovation release and have your prod site running one version and the test one. Therefore the testsite could be like /mytestsite and this will work anyhow. Anyway I looked in

/etc/apache2/conf-enabled

and created:

sudo vi myredirect.conf

Redirect / http://checkmk.mydomain.se/mysite/check_mk/

Now you should be able to just type your dns name and go straight into your site.

Next step and part 2 is going to be about setting the basic structure of your cmk.