October was a pretty exciting month in regards to Checkmk. We held the first official Checkmk Training in Bucharest, Romania and participated with a 60 minute presentation at the 2ND Checkmk Conference in Munich, Germany.
The presentation was all about automation, something we’re pretty big on around here. One of our main focus areas is the IT infrastructure and we make sure that you have a solid base for your business applications. At the conference I presented how we are approaching the integration of the Checkmk monitoring system with Ansible, an IT automation tool. The scope is to easily deploy and configure initial set-ups and getting to a point where these systems can do a certain level of self-healing or self-repairing.
All of the code used for the presentation is available on our github account. We use somewhat modified playbooks as an extended event handler whereby we repair failed services. Others are using this idea to redeploy entire VM’s or containers which is also a quick solution to bringing up failed services especially in a cloud environment.
We’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us to get to a truly self-healing configuration but this is an extremely easy way to get started and at least have some automated actions available when something is not working as expected.
One of the issues we’re still working on is identifying a way to map Ansible handlers to Check_MK services. Basically we’re looking for ways to tag our services much in the same way that Check_MK provides host tags. If we can achieve this then we can have a one-to-one mapping between Ansible tags and Check_MK tags which would make executing handlers a more streamlined operation.
There’s work to be done for sure but the content made available provides a quick way to deploy the Check_MK server, the agents on all of your hosts, performing a service discovery and the applying those changes. With minor modification you can extend those playbooks to do just about anything you want.
Check_MK and Ansible are a great way to quickly start monitoring and automating repetitive tasks within your IT infrastructure.
If you would like more information about Check_MK, Ansible or possibly how to integrate these two give us a call and we can schedule a demo specific to your environment.