Checkmk GmbH is a software company specializing in IT infrastructure monitoring solutions. Their primary product, Checkmk, ensures IT infrastructures operate at peak performance by monitoring cloud, hybrid, and data center environments, as well as modern containers and networks. The company is known for combining scalable enterprise-grade monitoring with open-source extensibility. It serves tens of thousands of users across more than 50 countries, helping prevent outages and reduce time to issue resolution. Their solutions integrate seamlessly within open observability ecosystems and other applications, empowering broad IT monitoring coverage.
Checkmk GmbH was founded in 2007 in Munich, Germany. Originally, until April 2019, the company operated as Mathias Kettner GmbH, and the product was named Check_MK. It was later rebranded to tribe29 GmbH and recently renamed Checkmk GmbH in April 2023. The product began as an agent-substituting shell script based on Nagios and has evolved into a fully self-contained monitoring system with its own core, moving beyond its Nagios roots. Checkmk focuses exclusively on IT monitoring with continuous innovation, and over the past 5 years, the company has experienced remarkable growth with a team size increase exceeding 500%, now having between 201-500 employees.
the company has grown organically and sustainably, supporting steady expansion and innovation from its own revenues.
Checkmk offers a comprehensive IT monitoring platform that supports status-based monitoring, metric-based time-series analysis, and log/event-based monitoring. It features more than 2,000 vendor-maintained plug-ins covering servers, applications, networks, cloud workloads, hybrid environments, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, and containers. Features include auto-discovery of hosts and services, automated configurations, seamless API integration, and a modern, scalable microcore optimized for high-performance monitoring in large distributed environments. There are both open source and commercial editions, with enterprise offerings adding advanced automation, dynamic workload monitoring, and enhanced visualization. Checkmk integrates with tools like Grafana and supports deployment automation tools such as Ansible and Salt.
Checkmk GmbH. Product expansions have mainly come through continuous development and rebranding efforts, evolving the solution from Nagios-based origins to a modern, scalable, and extensible monitoring platform supporting cloud and container ecosystems.
Recent versions of Checkmk have focused on expanding cloud infrastructure monitoring (AWS, Azure, Kubernetes), improving automation (agent management, plug-in configurations), and enhancing visualization and integration capabilities. The platform supports dynamic environments with ephemeral services and auto-registration features, reflecting modern IT infrastructure trends.
Checkmk promotes a culture of innovation, collaboration, and diversity. With a workforce of over 150 employees from more than 30 countries, the company values flat hierarchies, agile and customer-centric approaches, collective intelligence, and inclusive work environments. They emphasize continuous improvement, creativity, and empowering employees to make impactful decisions. The culture supports remote work and fosters a mission-driven environment dedicated to making IT infrastructures reliable and resilient.
Checkmk has a large global user base with tens of thousands of users worldwide across more than 50 countries. It supports diverse industries with large, distributed IT infrastructures, sometimes monitoring hundreds of thousands of devices. The product enjoys a strong open source community foundation with an open core business model, allowing users to extend and customize the software. Its extensive plugin architecture and community-driven development contribute to its broad adoption and active user engagement.
Checkmk
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