Installation on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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 Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and all binary compatible distributions such as CentOS, AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux, the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository must be set up as a package source.

The setup as a package source is done with the help of an RPM package, which can be installed with the dnf command.

Here is an example of the installation of the EPEL package on version 10:

In order to be able to use EPEL on Red Hat and binary compatible distributions, 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.

All supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux use the CodeReady Linux Builder (CRB): You can activate them using the subscription-manager. For RHEL 10.x, for example, it can be installed with the following command:

AlmaLinux 8.x and Rocky Linux 8.x use PowerTools, which are activated using Dandified YUM (dnf):

Starting with version 9.x, the free binary compatible distributions such as AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux also use CRB instead of PowerTools:

Since RHEL and thus also the binary compatible distributions also deliver Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and a local firewall by default, adjustments may still have to be made here. As the first step you will need to allow your web server to access the network interfaces:

If you are using firewalld, enable the web server and activate the change:

First choose the Checkmk edition that suits your needs. On the download page you will find Checkmk Raw, which is Open Source, and Checkmk Cloud, which is free to use for up to 750 services. If you have a subscription, then you will find the installation packages in the customer portal.

We recommend the use of the latest stable Checkmk version. If you need an older version (for example, as the basis for restoring a backup), you can find it in the download archive. Make sure that the package you select exactly matches the installed Linux distribution and its version.

After you have downloaded the package, bring it to the Linux system on which Checkmk is to be installed. This can be done, for example, with the scp command line tool, which comes with every modern system — and which is also available in PowerShell since Windows 10. Additional programs such as WinSCP are usually not required.

The example shows the transfer of a Checkmk Raw package to a system running RHEL 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:

As next step, import the key to the list of trusted signatures. On RHEL and all binary compatible distributions this is a job for the rpm tool:

Once you have imported the key, you can verify the package and install it the usual way with dnf 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: