Integrating Checkmk in Grafana

To install the plug-in, simply download the zip file with the latest version, and copy it – for example, with scp – to the Grafana server.

Alternatively, you can also load the file directly from the command line. Note that you need to know the correct version for this.

Now unpack the archive:

Next, move the newly created folder to Grafana’s plug-in directory. Its path is usually: /var/lib/grafana/plugins/

Change ownership to the Grafana user (typically grafana):

Installation by cloning the Git archive (as stated in previous versions of this document) is no longer possible.

As of Grafana 8.0, it is no longer possible to easily integrate external plug-ins if they have not been signed. This applies to the Checkmk plug-in which is still under development, so that you also need an additional step.

To do so, open /etc/grafana/grafana.ini in your favorite editor, navigate to the`[plugins]` section and modify the line ;allow_loading_unsigned_plugins = as follows. Make sure to remove the semicolon at the beginning of the line:

With this setting you add an exception for this single plug-in. If you are using Grafana in a (Docker) container, either link the custom INI file into the container or create a volume which you map to the directory in the container (/etc/grafana). The following code blocks show an example of how to link the INI file using --mount. Note that this is only an example and will probably not fit your environment exactly:

After changing the configuration file, updating or installing the plug-in, restart the Grafana service:

Afterwards the plug-in is available in the Grafana GUI, and from there can be activated and configured.

Once the necessary files have been installed you can activate the plug-in in Grafana. Go to the configuration and select the Data sources tab. Here you can add a new data source using the Add data sources button:

The entry for Checkmk can be found at the bottom of the category Others:

The configuration form for the data source is quite simple. Enter the URL for your site and an automation user who has rights to access the Web API. Important: In a distributed setup with multiple sites, specify the URL for the central site in the input field:

If you want to connect more than one Checkmk site, you can optionally add a unique name to each connection — otherwise simply leave the default tribe-29-checkmk-datasource as is.

After you have saved the connection with the Save & Test button, it will be available as a data source in Grafana and you can configure your first graphs.

Dashboards are generated in Grafana using the ‘plus’ icon on the left side. Clicking on Dashboard will open a new, blank dashboard:

The simplest dashboard shows a single graph for a service on a host. This can also be the metric of a local check for which no prebuilt graphs exist. In an existing dashboard or the one you just created, create a new panel. First select Add Panel here:

Creating the panel immediately takes you to adding a new Query. In the Data source menu, select tribe-29-checkmk-data-source.

Access to data for visualization is slightly different between Checkmk Raw Edition and Checkmk Enterprise Editions: In the Raw Edition you have to select from predefined menus for site, host name, service and so on. The Enterprise Editions provide more flexibilty by using cascades of filters. This allows for very detailed selection, for example, by using regular expressions. We have chosen an example for which you can action its configuration procedure in both Checkmk editions.

First choose the Site, then filter for the Hostname used in monitoring. For the first test select an arbitrary host that uses the Windows or Linux agent. As the Service choose Check_MK. Set the type of Aggregation to Lines. For the Graph type you have to select between Single metric or Template: Templates inherit metrics from Checkmk that may also contain combined graphs. Our screenshots show the Single metric containing the Time spent waiting for Checkmk agent:

Grafana will instantly show the result. Now click on Apply to save the graph. This brings you back to the dashboard where you click the floppy disk icon (Save dashboard) in the upper right area to save it. Afterwards you’ll be prompted to specify a title for the new Dashboard.

The developers of Checkmk already have aggregated many corresponding metrics into combined graphs to enable users to get a quicker overview on the various aspects of a single resource. You can display the metrics from such a ready-made graph directly in Grafana.

The procedure starts in the same way as explained in the previous section, but differs at Graph type by selecting the Template entry and the Template of the service to be used.

Once you are satisfied with the selection made, click the Apply button. The graph will now be available in the selected dashboard.

Especially in a dynamic cluster, you will often want to be able to track the entire history of a metric across all participating hosts without having to modify a graph each time a new node is added or removed. To achieve this you have several options for dynamically customizing graphs.

The first way is to filter by Host Labels or Host Tags instead of selecting individual hosts. Another option is to use regular expressions. You can apply regular expressions to hosts or services. In the example, filesystem matches all services that contain filesystem — no matter how many file systems a host has mounted.

The entry filesystem.*nvme would narrow down the selection to all filesystems on NVME drives, regardless of the type of filesystem, since any string is allowed between filesystem and nvme.

In addition to the advanced filter options, with Aggregation you can specify the representation of the metrics in the graph, and with Graph, which graph should be used as a reference. Note that metrics for a host/service will only be displayed if the host/service also has this selected graph. The example graph looks like this:

Earlier beta versions allowed the display of metric names to be controlled using variables. Here the following variables $title, $site, $host and $service were allowed: This feature was removed from version 2.0b1 of the plug-in because it actually duplicated a functionality that is already a part of Grafana. In case you need for example the site name contained in the name of the metric but not as a filtering criteria, create a filter using a regular expression that uses the asterisk * to match any site.

In the editing mode of each panel you find a Transform tab. With the subitem Rename by regex you can reorder the naming of metrics or suppress information that is not needed. Our following example searches two groups of characters that are separated by a comma and following space, swaps them and prepends Service und Host.

The variables $1 and $2 here correspond to the strings 'captured' in the line above (match groups or capture groups). Grafana also allows for nested match groups. An overview of their options is shown in the corresponding section in the regular expressions article.