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Checkmk VS Netdata

Compare Checkmk VS Netdata and see what are their differences

Checkmk logo Checkmk

Checkmk - the software for effective IT monitoring

Netdata logo Netdata

Monitor your servers, containers, and applications, in high-resolution and in real-time.
  • Checkmk Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-21

Checkmk is a comprehensive solution for IT Monitoring of servers, applications, networks, cloud infrastructures (public, private, hybrid), containers, storage, databases and environment sensors. In the network field we support SNMP, but also have integrations to APIs and powerful agents for operating systems. Our users benefit from more than 1.900 Plugins for vendors like Cisco, Brocade, Dell, Enterasys, Extreme Networks, Huawei, Intel and many more.

  • Netdata Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-02-16

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It is designed to run on all physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters, and edge/IoT devices, to monitor your systems, containers & applications.

Scales nicely from a single server to thousands of servers, even in complex multi/mixed/hybrid cloud environments & given enough disk space it can keep your metrics for years.

KEY FEATURES:

๐Ÿ’ฅ Collects metrics from 800+ integrations OS metrics, container metrics, VMs, hardware sensors, apps metrics, OpenMetrics exporters, StatsD & logs.

๐Ÿ’ช Real-Time, Low-Latency, High-Resolution All metrics are collected per second & are on the dashboard immediately after data collection. Netdata is fast.

๐Ÿ˜ถโ€๐ŸŒซ๏ธ Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Trains multiple ML models for each metric collected & detects anomalies based on the past behavior of each metric individually.

๐Ÿ”ฅ Powerful Visualization Clear & precise visualization that allows you to quickly understand any dataset, but also to filter, slice & dice the data directly on the dashboard, without the need to learn any query language.

๐Ÿ”” Out of box Alerts Hundreds of alerts out of the box to detect common issues & pitfalls, revealing issues that can easily go unnoticed. It supports several notification methods to let you know when your attention is needed.

๐Ÿ“– systemd Journal Logs Explorer (BETA - nightly release channel) Provides a systemd journal logs explorer, to view, filter & analyze system & apps logs by directly accessing systemd journal files on individual hosts & infrastructure-wide logs centralization servers.

๐Ÿ˜Ž Low Maintenance Fully automated in every aspect: automated dashboards, out-of-the-box alerts, auto-detection & discovery of metrics, zero-touch ML, easy scalability, high availability &CI/CD friendly.

โญ Open & Extensible Netdata is a modular platform that can be extended in all possible ways and it also integrates nicely with other monitoring solutions.

Checkmk

$ Details
freemium โ‚ฌ600 / Annually
Platforms
Windows Linux
Release Date
-

Netdata

$ Details
freemium $3 / Monthly (Netdata Pro, $3 /Node /mo - Netdata Business, $4 /Node /mo )
Platforms
Linux Docker AWS Azure Mac OSX Cloud Windows Edge NGINX Oracle
Release Date
2018 June

Checkmk features and specs

  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Checkmk offers extensive monitoring capabilities for servers, networks, applications, and cloud services, providing a holistic view of IT infrastructure.
  • Scalability
    The tool is designed to scale seamlessly from small environments to large, distributed enterprise networks, making it suitable for organizations of all sizes.
  • Ease of Use
    Checkmk features an intuitive web-based interface, which simplifies the setup and administration of monitoring services.
  • Flexible Configuration
    It allows for both automatic configuration and manual fine-tuning, giving administrators the flexibility to customize monitoring to their specific needs.
  • Integration Capabilities
    Checkmk supports integration with a variety of third-party tools like Ticketing systems, CMDBs, and communication platforms, streamlining workflows and enhancing efficiency.
  • Alerting and Notifications
    Advanced alerting and notification options ensure that IT staff are quickly informed of issues, with customizable thresholds and multi-channel notifications.
  • Extensive Plugin Support
    The availability of numerous plugins extends Checkmkโ€™s functionality, catering to a wide range of monitoring scenarios.

Possible disadvantages of Checkmk

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Despite its ease of use, the extensive feature set can be overwhelming for new users, requiring time and training to fully leverage its capabilities.
  • Cost
    While there is an open-source edition, the enterprise edition with advanced features can be relatively expensive compared to some other monitoring solutions.
  • Resource Intensive
    Checkmk can be demanding on system resources, especially in large deployments, necessitating robust hardware and careful resource planning.
  • Complex Initial Setup
    The initial setup, particularly for complex environments, can be time-consuming and may require significant effort to configure correctly.
  • Limited Support for Non-Linux Systems
    While it is strong in monitoring Linux environments, support for non-Linux systems may not be as extensive, potentially limiting its use in heterogeneous environments.
  • Dependency on Network Connectivity
    Checkmk's effectiveness can be hampered by poor network connectivity, which can affect the accuracy and timeliness of monitoring data.
  • Documentation
    Despite being comprehensive, some users have reported that the documentation can be dense and difficult to navigate, making problem-solving more challenging.

Netdata features and specs

  • Dashboards & visualizations
    Digestible, intuitive, and visually appealing charts for troubleshooting.
  • Configurable
    Zero configuration. Zero maintenance. No preparations. Sane defaults. Auto-detection for all metrics. Immediately usable.
  • Metrics
    Netdata collects, stores and visualizes all the metrics available. We almost never filter out metrics. The more metrics, the better.
  • Real time monitoring
    Netdata is real-time. It collects all metrics every second and it has a data collection to visualization latency of less than a millisecond.
  • Analytics and Reporting
    Detailed analysis on how applications and systems are performing

Analysis of Checkmk

Overall verdict

  • Checkmk is considered a good choice for organizations looking for a flexible and comprehensive monitoring solution. Its ability to handle large volumes of data and provide real-time analytics makes it well-suited for diverse IT infrastructures.

Why this product is good

  • Checkmk is a robust IT monitoring solution known for its comprehensive features and scalability. It offers an intuitive user interface, extensive monitoring capabilities, and an efficient alerting system. It supports both agent-based and agentless monitoring, making it adaptable to various environments. Checkmk integrates well with other tools and provides detailed insights through dashboards and reports. Its flexibility allows for customization to meet specific business needs.

Recommended for

    Checkmk is recommended for IT teams in medium to large enterprises that require a scalable and versatile monitoring solution. It is particularly beneficial for organizations with complex IT infrastructures that need reliable monitoring and alerting capabilities. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and data centers can also significantly benefit from its multi-tenancy and distributed monitoring features.

Analysis of Netdata

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Netdata is generally regarded as a valuable tool for system monitoring and troubleshooting. It is praised for its speed, ease of use, and detailed insights, making it an effective solution for diverse monitoring needs.

Why this product is good

  • Netdata is considered good because it provides real-time monitoring and troubleshooting of systems. It offers detailed insights with minimal resource consumption, and features a user-friendly interface, making it accessible for both technical and non-technical users. Its open-source nature allows for customization and integration with other data sources, enhancing its capabilities.

Recommended for

  • IT professionals who need real-time system diagnostics
  • DevOps teams seeking efficient monitoring tools
  • Small to medium enterprises looking for cost-effective monitoring solutions
  • Open-source enthusiasts who prefer customizable software
  • Organizations that require scalable monitoring solutions across different environments

Checkmk videos

Episode 1: Install Checkmk and monitor your first hosts

Netdata videos

Install Netdata on Linux in two minutes

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Netdata's standard dashboard

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Checkmk and Netdata)
Monitoring Tools
61 61%
39% 39
Log Management
71 71%
29% 29
Performance Monitoring
36 36%
64% 64
Application Performance Monitoring

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Checkmk and Netdata

Checkmk Reviews

The Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools in 2023
Description: Checkmk Raw Edition is an open source infrastructure and application monitoring tool that also includes network monitoring capabilities. For network monitoring, Checkmk can discover and monitor switches and routers, wireless networks, and firewalls; the software supports integration with several network hardware vendors. The solution uses a rule-based concept...
Top 10 PRTG Alternatives for Monitoring Networks and IT Infrastructure
Those wanting to monitor databases as part of their network analysis can do so with Checkmk, as well as track Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity and performance, the latter being sometimes tricky with other network monitoring software.
10 Best Zabbix Alternatives
The Checkmk server can only be deployed on a Linux machine. A basic knowledge of Linux is all you need to get the application up and running. All the software you need is either included in your Linux distribution or in the Checkmk package. It is also possible to run Checkmk as a virtual appliance, a physical appliance, or as a Docker-Container. The agents used by Checkmk to...
10 Best Open Source Monitoring Software for IT Infrastructure
Flexible monitoring: Over 1,900 official integrations provided โ€˜out of the boxโ€™. Monitor states, metrics, events & logs via Checkmk agents, vendor APIs, SNMP, or any way you prefer
Source: geekflare.com
13 Best Nagios Alternatives for Networks, Servers, IT Systems Monitoring
Unlike Solarwinds NPM described above which is focused only on networking, checkmk can monitor a wide range of devices such as servers, network devices, applications etc.

Netdata Reviews

The Best Cacti Monitoring Alternatives
Netdata gives you access to sublime real-time health and performance monitoring for all your systems. The Netdata GitHub community has made its growth abundantly clear throughout its last six years of active development.
10 Best Open Source Monitoring Software for IT Infrastructure
Netdata provides unparalleled real-time health monitoring and performance troubleshooting for systems and applications. Over the past six years of development, Netdataโ€™s GitHub community has been essential to its growth.
Source: geekflare.com
4 Best Open Source Dashboard Monitoring Tools In 2019
โ€œPullโ€ method : you can set Netdata to run on individual nodes and plug your dashboards directly to it. This way, you can scale your node to your needs and you are not concerned about the scaling of different nodes. Also, storage is scoped to whatโ€™s really needed by a particular node thus more efficient;

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Checkmk should be more popular than Netdata. It has been mentiond 54 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Checkmk mentions (54)

  • Ask HN: What do you monitor on your servers?
    Or Checkmk [1], which is coming from Nagios and brings thousands of plugins for nearly every hardware and service you can think of.. [1] https://checkmk.com/. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Monitoring solution
    CheckMK https://checkmk.com. You can spin this up in a docker container. Source: about 3 years ago
  • "All in one monitoring solution"?
    I use CheckMK to do all of this and more, except nutanix. But checkmk also can Monitor nutanix via the "Nutanix Prism" special agent Integration. Source: over 3 years ago
  • Is there an alternative to BI Tools?
    BI machine and NVR report to CheckMK Raw host so it's easy to see historic stats. Source: over 3 years ago
  • Uptime Monitor
    Iโ€™m using https://checkmk.com/ to monitor stuff and it seems to work great. Lots of built in features and functions and if they donโ€™t have what you need you can also create custom scripts to check and report on anything you can dream up. Runs great in docker (Iโ€™m using portainer but will run fine in plain old docker). Source: over 3 years ago
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Netdata mentions (6)

  • From Netdata Inspiration to SaaS MVP: Server Monitoring with Bun + Claude Code Opus 4.6
    If you've ever set up Netdata, you know that feeling โ€” hundreds of real-time charts, per-second granularity, metrics you didn't even know your kernel exposed. It's a wonderful piece of software, genuinely one of the best open-source monitoring tools out there. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Trying to decide best practices for production environment
    Pros are instant HA and Migration. Cons are huge bandwidth hits. With your 4x1gbe you would be maxed out on replicating those 25 VMs. You wouldn't have anything for users. I have a test lab with 4 nodes, 22cpu 100gbram and 30tb space, using low end stuff, 12hdds. Proxmox, ceph dashboard, (the native ceph dashboard you can turn on), and a netdata.cloud account. So I watch it like a hawk and like to load test. Source: over 3 years ago
  • Ask HN: Reducing the maintenance surface area of hosting a small internal app
    Docker-compose, not k8s. Set up a script to update the OS, pull all your containers and reboot after hours once a week or once a day. Make sure the script specifies non interactive. Set up alerting for low disk space, see https://netdata.cloud or use your own tool. - Source: Hacker News / over 4 years ago
  • Whatโ€™s your preferred stack?
    There can be some issues if you mix and match elastic versions, wazuh versions, logstash versions. But the documentation guides you very well with matrix of what is and is not compatible. You will want a beefy VM to run it in, I started smaller than I should of, and after running a while it kind of puked on itself, certain things would randomly stop working. After giving it 32GB RAM, plenty of disk 4TB, and 8... Source: almost 5 years ago
  • Netdata on MacOS
    $ brew info netdata Netdata: stable 1.29.3 (bottled) Diagnose infrastructure problems with metrics, visualizations & alarms Https://netdata.cloud/ Not installed From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/netdata.rb License: GPL-3.0-or-later ==> Dependencies Build: autoconf โœ˜, automake โœ˜, pkg-config โœ” Required: json-c โœ˜, libuv โœ˜, lz4 โœ˜, openssl@1.1 โœ” ==> Caveats To start netdata: brew... Source: almost 5 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Checkmk and Netdata, you can also consider the following products

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

Paessler PRTG - An advanced network monitoring solution to monitor network up/downtime, traffic and usage.

Nagios - Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Sumo Logic - Sumo Logic is a secure, purpose-built cloud-based machine data analytics service that leverages big data for real-time IT insights