Checkmk vs InfluxDB comparison

Checkmk is a powerful tool for monitoring IT infrastructure, providing vital insights on servers, databases, network devices, and custom applications.

Primarily used for supervising IT infrastructure, Checkmk helps organizations ensure service availability by monitoring hosts, processes, load, storage, and network appliances. With support for both Linux and Windows environments across multiple data centers, Checkmk performs compliance checks and preserves historical data for core network devices.

• Auto-discovery: Automatically identifies new hosts and applies monitoring rules.
• Custom monitoring: Enhances MySQL performance tracking.
• Slack integration: Provides immediate downtime alerts.
• Graphical trend analysis: Offers 400 days of trend data.
• Multiple site monitoring: Ensures seamless data synchronization through task automation.
• Resource and infrastructure monitoring: Configures log factors to fit budget constraints.
• System metric imports: Includes servers, SQL, file systems, and application monitoring.

• Time-saving: Auto-discovery and task automation streamline processes.
• Proactive alerts: Immediate downtime notifications optimize response times.
• Historical insights: Long-term graphical trend analysis aids strategic planning.
• Cost efficiency: Resource monitoring aligned with budget constraints.

Checkmk is deployed extensively in large enterprise environments for monitoring critical infrastructure. It proves particularly useful under conditions of frequent power outages or network issues, helping maintain smooth operations. While the alert acknowledgment process and interface require improvements, and the lack of an agent-less platform complicates server management, the strengths in auto-discovery, integration, and comprehensive monitoring make Checkmk a strong contender for IT infrastructure monitoring.

InfluxDB is open-source software that helps developers and enterprises alike to collect, store, process, and visualize time series data and to build next-generation applications. InfluxDB provides monitoring and insight on IoT, application, system, container, and infrastructure quickly and easily without complexities or compromises in scale, speed, or productivity.

InfluxDB has become a popular insight system for unified metrics and events enabling the most demanding SLAs. InfluxDB is used in just about every type of industry across a wide range of use cases, including network monitoring, IoT monitoring, industrial IoT, and infrastructure and application monitoring.

InfluxDB offers its users:

• Infrastructure and application monitoring: Collect, process, and analyze real-time data from edge devices to help optimize distributed infrastructure. 

• IoT monitoring and analytics: InfluxDB is designed to store large volumes of time series data and quickly perform real-time analysis on that data. Gain insights from all the sensor data and use the collected data to create and perform automated tasks. 

• Network monitoring: Manage responsive and high-performing networks with widely distributed resources.

InfluxDB Benefits

There are several benefits to using InfluxDB . Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• APIs and ready toolset: InfluxDB can be accessed via a set of powerful tools enabling users to get started quickly, with less programming required. This includes a REST API, extensive client libraries, a wide variety of open-source integrations, and Flux - a functional data scripting language for querying, analysis, and events. The InfluxDB API can be used to write data from edge devices to the InfluxDB instance 

• Time series engine: Get any data - events, logs, traces - from any edge device - systems, sensors, queues, databases, and networks. This data is stored in a powerful and high-performing engine capable of ingesting millions of data points per second.

• Community: InfluxDB has a large community of cloud and open-source developers ready to assist users. 

• Ready-made templates: Use InfluxDB Templates, a set of tools with a packager and other ready monitoring solutions. These tools allow users to share their monitoring expertise with coworkers and other community members around the world. The Templates gallery offers available templates for some of the most popular tools and applications.

• Enhanced UI: InfluxDB’s UI includes an explorer, dashboarding tools, and a script editor. Use it to easily browse the collected metric and event data and apply common transformations. The dashboarding tool comes with a variety of visualization options that help users view insights from the data. The script editor assists users to quickly master Flux with easily accessible examples, auto-completion, and real-time syntax checking.

Reviews from Real Users

InfluxDB stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its flexible integration options and its data aggregation feature.

Shalauddin Ahamad S., a software engineer at a tech services company, notes, “The most valuable features are aggregating the data and the integration with Grafana for monitoring.”