Installation on Red Hat and CentOS

Checkmk requires a number of software packages from your Linux distribution. Third-party software is not required. In order that all necessary packages can be subsequently installed, a correct configuration of the software sources is necessary.

With Red Hat and CentOS the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository must be set up as a package source. You can do this with the help of an RPM package, which can be installed with the yum command:

Here is an example of an installation on CentOS 8:

In order to be able to use EPEL on RedHat and CentOS, the package sources for optional RPMs are required if these haven’t already been installed during the operating system installation. Without these sources the freeradius-utils, graphviz-gd, and php-mbstring packages will be missing. As of version 8.x it will suffice to activate the so-called PowerTools with the help of Dandified YUM in CentOS or the subscription-manager in RHEL respectively. This can be done, e.g., with the following commands:

Red Hat/CentOS 7.X:

CentOS 8.X before 8.3.2011:

CentOS 8.3.2011 and later:

RedHat 8.X:

Since Red Hat and thus CentOS also deliver SELinux and a local firewall by default, adjustments may have to be made here. As the first step you will need to allow your web server to access the network interfaces:

Secondly, you release the web server and activate the change:

If you have a subscription, you will find in the customer portal a suitable RPM or DEB package for your distribution for every available Checkmk version. For a free test or small installations of Checkmk you can use our free editions. These don’t need in consequence any subscription. You are still able to do an upgrade any time to one of the Checkmk Enterprise Editions.

Consider when selecting a package:

After you downloaded the package to your machine, you need to copy the file to the target Linux system where Checkmk needs to be installed. You can do that for example with the WinSCP program or — if you are able to use SSH connections — with the command line tool scp, in the following example for the Checkmk Raw Edition and CentOS 8.x:

All packages are signed using GnuPG. Through the use of this signature, on the one hand it can be verified whether the package really is from Checkmk, and on the other hand it can be verified that the package is complete.

So that these signed packages can be installed in the usual way, one time only you will need to import our public key so that the signature will be trusted. First, load the key directly from our website:

Then import the key to the list of trusted signatures. On Red Hat and CentOS this is yet another job for rpm:

Once the key has been imported, you can verify the package and install it the usual way with yum install afterwards:

After the successful installation of Checkmk, and all dependencies, you will have access to the omd command. With this command you are able to create and manage monitoring sites. You can request the installed version to verify your installation: