Dear readers,
we are pleased that you have found your way to Checkmk — and have visited the Checkmk User guide while doing so.
The problem-free operation of IT systems has always been a challenge. Both the complexity of hardware and software stacks and the demands of users continue to increase — whether they are working with real hardware or with cloud solutions. This is why detailed and comprehensive IT monitoring plays such a central role nowadays.
The requirements that users place on their monitoring are of course as complex as the IT world itself. Checkmk was developed from the outset for large and heterogeneous IT landscapes, which is why it offers such a wealth of functions and options to meet all of the problems that result from this in practice. For this reason, the comprehensiveness of Checkmk can be overwhelming for a beginner at first.
To make sure you can nevertheless start your first Checkmk monitoring quickly and more easily, we have divided the Checkmk User guide into two parts for you:
A Beginner’s guide, the introduction to which you are reading now, and which will guide you in the following chapters as you get to know Checkmk;
A comprehensive reference section for experts, which comprises the rest of the User guide.
The Beginner’s guide gives you a compact step-by-step introduction to Checkmk and it is structured in such a way that you can read it quickly from beginning to end and participate right away. Therefore it is short and concise and does not dwell on unnecessary details. By the end of the Beginner’s guide you will have a functional Checkmk system. In the last chapter we will show you some very useful tips and tricks from our experienced consultants, which have proven themselves in various Checkmk installations.
Of course, the Beginner’s guide still leaves many questions unanswered. These are answered in the User guide’s reference section. There you will find all of the background information and details on topics that we can only touch on in the Beginner’s guide, so that you can delve deeper — on your way from beginner to Checkmk expert.