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Agenda

Welcome
11:00–11:10

Melina Weide

Strategic Talk

Welcome to #CMKConf12

The Evolution of Checkmk - Unified IT Observability for the Hybrid World
11:10–11:30

Jan Justus

Strategic Talk

Jan Justus will reflect on the evolution of Checkmk over the years and provide a glimpse into the future.

The New Checkmk 2.5 - Easier, faster, and even more scalable
11:30–12:30

Martin Hirschvogel & Afrida Mahbub

Strategic Talk

Hear from the product leads on the signals that shaped Checkmk 2.5, and dive into the exciting new features and capabilities.

The Missing Link: Bridging the Gap Between Infrastructure and Applications
14:00–14:30

Sebastian Krahe & Jörg Herbel

Solution Talk

For years, Checkmk has been the bedrock of your infrastructure monitoring. But in any IT landscape, looking at the infrastructure is only half the story. Join us for a first look at how Checkmk 2.5 transforms into a full-stack monitoring and observability platform designed to monitor anything, from the oldest legacy hardware to the most modern cloud-native applications and microservices.

We’ll explore how native OpenTelemetry (OTLP) support and Prometheus exporter scraping allow you to look deep inside your applications without adding more tools to your stack. See how we align application telemetry with infrastructure health in a single pane of glass, enabling faster resolutions with a powerful new data backend, and removing monitoring silos.

Full- stack visibility in practice: How Südwestrundfunk deployed application monitoring with Checkmk
14:30–14:45

Frank Baier (Südwestrundfunk)

Customer Fireside

Transitioning from traditional infrastructure monitoring to full-stack monitoring is a journey many organizations struggle to complete. In this fireside chat, we sit down with one of our long-standing customer, Südwestrundfunk (SWR), to move past the technical details and discuss the actual business and operational impact of unifying the stack.

We will explore the practical transition from "keeping the lights on" to gaining deep, actionable insights into both legacy enterprise applications and modern microservices alike.

Engineering for scale: Introducing Checkmk Relay for large scale distributed deployments
14:45–15:05

Moritz Kiemer

Platform Talk

Managing 100 remote locations shouldn't feel like 100 times the work. In this session, we will share how the new Checkmk Relay – a lightweight, self-updating container, simplifies monitoring for smaller segments by moving all monitoring logic to your central site. You will discover how to use Relay to eliminate the complexity of OS dependencies and hardware planning while securely reaching every corner of your network with zero inbound traffic.

We will also share a definitive comparison of when to deploy a full remote site versus Relay, focusing on scale, maintenance overhead, and network constraints.

Monitoring at Scale: How Arkane Studios Manages Global IT Infrastructure
15:05–15:25

Laurent Barbier (Arkane Studios)

Customer Fireside

Managing a high-performance IT environment for hundreds of developers across international data centers requires more than just basic oversight. In this fireside chat, we will speak to Laurent Barbier, the IT Infrastructure Manager at Arkane Studios to share how they moved from labor-intensive manual setups to a highly automated monitoring architecture with Checkmk. With a small team of four admins overseeing over 25,000 services across France, Germany and Sweden, Arkane faces the constant challenge of balancing rapid development with system stability.

We will discuss:

Beyond Basic Discovery: Why tracking even the smallest system metrics proved essential for identifying the root causes of server slowdowns and storage bottlenecks.
Improving the Dev-Admin Workflow: How the team uses monitoring data to provide early warnings to developers, ensuring that new resource requests are sustainable and won't impact performance as they scale.
Global Infrastructure Management: Insights into managing a distributed footprint of virtual machines, storage, and critical network hubs across multiple time zones.
Connecting the Dots: Real-world examples of how having a comprehensive view of their European data backbone helped the team resolve complex database issues that were previously difficult to diagnose.

Monitoring at Scale: Azure, Containers, and Virtualization in Checkmk 2.5
15:25–15:55

Mohamed Saleh & David Gervasoni

Solution Talk

As environments shift toward massive multi-cloud setups and containerized workloads, your monitoring strategy must do more than keep up—it should lead.
Discover how Azure monitoring in Checkmk has been redesigned from the ground up with scale in mind.

The new simplified configuration and out-of-the-box support for key Azure services mean you can get up and running in minutes — even for very large, multi-subscription environments. We'll show you how the new presentation of host and service data is able to handle such large setups with ease, making the organization and management of your Azure resources in Checkmk more efficient than ever.

We'll also give you an overview of the most important highlights in container and virtualization monitoring, including a first look at the highly anticipated Podman monitoring, and expanded coverage for Hyper-V and Proxmox, ensuring your entire infrastructure is as observable as your cloud environments.

Future-Proofing Virtualization: Adaptive Proxmox Monitoring with Checkmk 2.5
15:55–16:15

Andreas Decker (comNET)

Knowledge Session

Managing a Proxmox environment means more than just checking if VMs are "up". It’s about cluster health, Ceph performance, and preventing resource bottlenecks before they crash your production. In this session, we’ll dive into the newly designed Proxmox workflow in Checkmk 2.5, which consolidates complex configuration rules into a single, guided experience.

Managed services at scale: How Netflex balances granular controls with efficiency as an MSP
16:15–16:30

Erik Schippers (Netflex)

Customer Fireside

For a Managed Service Provider (MSP), balancing granular controls with efficiency is a constant challenge. Join us for a fireside chat with Erik Schippers, IT Consultant at Netflex as we discuss how they manage a diverse portfolio of customers ranging from SaaS & software providers to education and healthcare.

Netflex will share how they leverage Checkmk’s MSP focused features to maintain strict tenant and data separation while providing a seamless experience for their clients. In this session, we will discuss:

Proactive Incident Prevention: A look at how trend analysis recently allowed the team to flag a rapidly expanding Hyper-V cluster and resolve a storage crisis before it impacted the customer’s operations.
Rapid Response to Vulnerabilities: How the team used custom community plugins to scan all customer environments during the Log4j crisis, providing full visibility and proactive remediation within just two hours.
Managing High-Security Remote Sites: The technical hurdles of monitoring isolated environments with strict TLS requirements and how they automate agent updates across hybrid Cloud and Hyper-V stacks.

From alert to answer: The Checkmk approach to practical AI
17:00–17:15

Matteo Villosio & Annika Felgenträger

Platform Talk

When a critical alert fires, every second spent decoding technical jargon is a second that could be used resolving. Join us to see how the new "Explain with AI" capability instantly translates complex technical signals into root cause analysis in natural language. We’ll demonstrate how this one-click feature helps your team skip the detective work and jump straight to the fix, drastically reducing your Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

The Fortified Watchtower: How to set up Checkmk securely
17:15–17:35

Ralf Spenneberg (OpenSource Security)

Knowledge Session

Because monitoring platforms require deep access to your infrastructure, they must be among the most secured systems in your network. This session provides a practical roadmap for hardening Checkmk to meet modern security and compliance standards. Learn how to build a multi-layered defense that ensures your Checkmk remains a trusted source of truth without sacrificing operational speed.

We will cover:

Identity & Access Management: Transitioning to Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and Single Sign-On (SSO) via Keycloak to secure all entry points, from human admins to automated API users.
Agent Delivery: Hardening the Agent Bakery to protect your deployment pipeline and prevent unauthorized code or configuration distribution.
Vulnerability Triage: Using CVSS scores to prioritize patches, ensuring critical vulnerabilities are addressed within strict enterprise windows
Network Isolation: Strategies for architecting distributed monitoring sites across isolated VLANs to prevent lateral movement and contain potential threats.

Beyond the Tracks: How SBB Monitors the Heartbeat of information systems on Swiss Railways with Checkmk
17:35–18:00

Maël Wyssbrod & Benjamin Schemer (SBB)

Customer Fireside

Managing a national railway means managing thousands of interconnected systems, where a single faulty component can affect the experience of over a million passengers every day. Join an exclusive fireside chat with leaders from the Team APFZ (Applications in Vehicles) and learn how Swiss Federal Railways scales Checkmk to meet the extreme demands of railway IT operations.

In this session, SBB will reveal how their monitoring strategy works and show how they ensure that every component in hundreds of trains is up to date and functioning optimally. We will watch a live demo of their Nagvis integration, which shows how they visualise complex train subsystems in real time to enable operations to take the right action.

Discover how SBB goes beyond traditional IT monitoring to gain complete visibility into mobile assets and ensure that safety, reliability and customer experience remain on track.

Programmable Monitoring: Automating your Monitoring Workflows with Checkmk 2.5
09:30–09:45

Torsten Engler

Platform Talk

As your infrastructure grows, managing it manually is no longer an option. This session shows you how to use the automation tools in Checkmk 2.5 to build a monitoring system that scales automatically. We will focus on how to use the new APIs to connect Checkmk to your tools and how to build your own custom monitoring checks.

We will cover:

Automation with REST APIs: Learn how to use versioned REST APIs to drive fast, programmable deployments across any environment. We will show you how to use these stable interfaces to automate host onboarding and configuration, ensuring your automation keeps working even after system updates.
Custom Extensibility with Developer APIs: Move beyond the defaults by using the new Developer APIs to build your own custom extensions. We will share best practices for writing your own plugins, giving you the flexibility to monitor specialized hardware or unique business applications exactly how you need to.

End-to-End Automation: How IONOS Scaled Global Monitoring with the Checkmk REST-API
09:45–10:00

Michael Greenup & Claudiu-Mihai Barbu

Customer Fireside

For a leading cloud service provider like IONOS, the network is the foundation of the business. Managing over 10,000 network components across 29 geo-redundant data centers requires a monitoring strategy that eliminates manual bottlenecks. Join the Claudiu-Mihai Barbu, Developer at the Network Business Unit in IONOS, for a fireside chat on how they transitioned from a maintenance intensive in-house tool to a fully automated monitoring architecture using Checkmk.

In this session, we will explore how IONOS manages a million services across high-availability clusters and remote instances. We will discuss:

API-First Configuration: How IONOS uses the Checkmk REST API to automate the entire onboarding and offboarding process for hosts, removing the dependency on internal software development resources.
Managing Multi-Vendor Complexity: The strategy for monitoring thousands of network components from various manufacturers using auto-discovery and over 2,000+ out-of-the-box plugins.
Reducing MTTR with Data Visibility: How the team exports metrics to the IONOS Metric Store and uses tailored dashboards to speed up root-cause analysis and ensure SLA compliance.
Scaling for Growth: Insights into how rule-based configurations allow IONOS to integrate new data centers and infrastructure at the speed of their 10% annual business growth.

From Alerts to Action: Self-Healing with Checkmk and Event Driven Ansible
10:00–10:20

René Koch (DI (FH) René Koch)

Knowledge Session

In this session, you will discover how to move from manual troubleshooting to a self-healing infrastructure. We will show how to close the loop between detecting a problem and fixing it by connecting Checkmk with event-driven Ansible.

Rather than waiting for an administrator to log in and run a script, you’ll learn how to use event-driven Ansible, an open-source addition to the traditional Ansible toolkit, to act as your first responder. We will walk through how the system receives real-time events via webhooks, analyzes the data, and automatically triggers the right playbook the moment a match is found.

From Monitoring to Automation: Orchestrating Checkmk with n8n
10:20–10:40

Ricardo Ribeiro & Daniel Ferreira (Lynxmind)

Knowledge Session

Modern monitoring environments require more than passive alerting they demand automation, orchestration and integration with operational workflows.

In this talk, I present n8n-nodes-checkmk, an open-source n8n community node that provides near-complete coverage of the Checkmk REST API v1.0 (38 resources, 100+ operations). This integration enables Checkmk to be used as an API-first automation backend, allowing monitoring data and configuration actions to be orchestrated as part of broader operational workflows.

The session covers:

How Checkmk can be orchestrated using workflows rather than scripts
Design decisions for mapping a large REST API into a low-code automation platform
Correct handling of ETags, pagination, concurrency, and idempotency
Real-world workflow patterns: host lifecycle management, maintenance windows, and incident response, and more.
Lessons learned from building and maintaining a large community integration

Through this process, Checkmk is positioned not only as a monitoring solution, but as a central operational control plane capable of orchestrating and automating modern infrastructures.

Synthetic Monitoring: The Path to True Observability
11:10–11:30

Simon Meggle

Solution Talk

Synthetic Monitoring closes the gap between infrastructure monitoring and real user experience at the application layer.

This session introduces two recent developments that move Checkmk closer to full-stack observability:

AI has become a valuable tool for efficiently creating automated tests. We’ll demonstrate this through an exciting client project in which the applications of the Swiss Air Rescue System are monitored using Checkmk Synthetic Monitoring.
We introduce a newly developed integration layer that allows you to integrate also results from other testing tools than Robot Framework into Checkmk – totally in line with our philosophy of monitoring all of your systems in one place.

Guardrails at Scale: How DZ BANK AG Governs 500,000 Monitoring Services
11:30–11:50

Hardy Duettmann (Iteratio) & Heiko Wenzig (DZ BANK)

Knowledge Session

Enterprise monitoring at scale requires more than powerful tooling – it demands automation, governance, and collaboration across many teams. At DZ BANK, one of Germany’s leading financial institutions, Checkmk is operated as a central monitoring platform configured in parallel by numerous teams across a broad service landscape.

In this talk, we showcase how DZ BANK built a highly automated, service-oriented Checkmk setup driven by data from ServiceNow. With approximately 17,000 monitored hosts, 500,000 Checkmk services, and around 280 active users with configuration permissions, automation is essential to ensure consistency, transparency, and operational efficiency.

Monitoring data is automatically collected from a wide range of platforms including customer specifice Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), StorageGrid, NetApp, Cloudability Cost Anomly, Cohesity and other customer specific monitoring agents and more. The information is processed, enriched, and distributed in a way that ensures each DZ BANK service receives exactly the relevant monitoring context – enabling clear ownership and faster incident response.

A key component of the architecture is a dedicated Kubernetes-based Checkmk environment, covering both on-premises and hybrid Kubernetes clusters. This environment is integrated into the central Checkmk instance in a read-only design, ensuring full visibility while maintaining separation and operational stability.

The session provides practical insights into automation patterns, customer specific monitoring customizations, and real-world lessons learned from running Checkmk at banking scale.

More on Infrastructure: Further improvements in Checkmk 2.5
11:50–12:05

Martin Hirschvogel

Platform Talk

This session covers the latest infrastructure improvements in Checkmk 2.5, focusing on how these updates help you gain better visibility into your network, databases, and logs.

We will cover:

Enhanced Web & Network Visibility: High-performance updates to HTTP monitoring and more intuitive network topology mapping to better visualize dependencies across your stack.
Database & Log Optimization: Streamlined monitoring for MSSQL and Oracle, alongside more efficient log processing to handle high-volume event data without the noise.
Expanded Plugin Ecosystem: A look at the latest out-of-the-box plugins and integrations that extend your reach into new hardware and modern cloud services.

Core Workflows Refined: Navigate Comfortably in Checkmk 2.5
13:35–14:05

Tanja Heyken & Logan Connolly

Platform Talk

Checkmk 2.5 reduces needless friction for newbies and experts alike. This session explores how we brought core workflows closer together, made them safer and more transparent, and simplified how you navigate Checkmk.

Just Search It: Use the new global search to find any setting, rule, dashboard, service or host instantly across both ‘Setup’ and ‘Monitor’, without needing to know where it lives.
Bridge common workflows: Efficiently perform core operations like host setup, agent installation/registration, and activate your changes without leaving the current page.
Visual feedback: Know when something is happening in the background like a View loading or search results processing with loading indicators.
Real-time feedback: Find and correct setup errors while configuring to ensure the system is always working as intended.

Dashboards reimagined: Powerful dashboards that are easy to build and even easier to analyze
14:05–14:25

Mathieu Sobrero & Wontek Hong

Platform Talk

Checkmk 2.5 makes it easier than ever to create, customize, and share insights across the organization with our improved dashboards.

In this session, we will cover:

Ease of Building: Build high-impact dashboards without trial and error using a redesigned guided workflow and a new widget preview that lets you see your data before you save it.
Perfect Views on Any Screen: Deploy responsive layouts that adapt automatically from a 4K NOC wall to your laptop with no manual adjustments.
Deep Application: Leverage the powerful analytics engine to apply structure to incoming telemetry post-ingestion, allowing for flexible exploration of application metrics.
External Sharing: Extend visibility to stakeholders outside of Checkmk using time-limited, custom invitations that provide access to specific dashboards.

Checkmk BI Made Easy: From Monitoring to Business Value
14:25–14:45

Sven-Erik Kujat & Thaireser Buhrmann (etomer GmbH)

Knowledge Session

How do you bridge the gap between alert noise and business outcomes? Join us for a deep dive into the Checkmk Business Intelligence (BI) solution delivered for WBM (Wohnungsbaugesellschaft Berlin-Mitte). We’ll show you how we transformed raw network metrics into a high-level operational cockpit – and how you can do the same.

This session is a practical masterclass in turning data into decisions. Using a real-world project as our guide, we’ll walk you through service mapping and intelligent alerting, proving that you don’t need deep Checkmk expertise to build a powerful BI layer. Learn how to cut through the silos, align your monitoring with business goals, and walk away with a roadmap to create immediate value for your organization.

High-Stakes Monitoring: How Munich Airport Secures Critical Infrastructure with Checkmk
15:15–15:35

Bastian Kuhn (Kuhn&Rueß) & Uwe Pojda (FMG)

Customer Fireside

Managing an airport's IT infrastructure is about ensuring the critical safety and stability of flight operations. Join Uwe Pojda (IT Operations Architect) from Munich Airport (FMG), and Bastian Kuhn for a candid fireside chat on the realities of IT monitoring at one of Europe’s busiest hubs. This session dives into the practical challenges of maintaining a massive on-premises environment comprising 13,000 hosts and 245,000 services while adhering to strict ISO 27001 and KRITIS security standards. We will discuss the tension between rapid innovation and the unwavering stability required for airport operations.

The IT Command Center: Discover how FMG monitors everything from various CCTV streams to the Oracle and MSSQL databases that power flight operations. A look at what happens in the IT Command Center when dashboards go dark, and how they use Nagvis and BI views maps to maintain a situational awareness for the entire airport.
The Security Tightrope: Real-world stories of meeting mandatory 24-hour patch windows for critical vulnerabilities while ensuring the airport’s "digital alignment" never misses a beat.
Under the Hood: A candid discussion on troubleshooting high-volume events, like managing 30 GB logging databases – and the creative solutions used to keep the system responsive.
Securing the Future: Why FMG is currently laser-focused on MFA and Keycloak integration to protect their automated software distribution pipelines.

What's Next Part 1: Reimagining Analytics and Visualization in Checkmk 3.0
15:35–16:05

Martin Hirschvogel, Lars Michelsen & Torsten Engler

Strategic Talk

This session focuses on the evolution of our data anlytics and visualization backbone, making massive amounts of data in your monitoring environment more accessible and actionable.

We will cover:

New Graphs: A look at the next generation of graphing that offers smoother interactions, faster load times, and more intuitive data correlation.
Next-Gen Dashboards: Discover the flexible, widget-based dashboard builder designed for both high-level overviews and deep-dive troubleshooting.
Dynamic Views: Learn how we are simplifying data presentation with smarter, customizable views that adapt to the context of the user.
Analytics & Trend Forecasting: An introduction to the new analytical capabilities that help you move from reactive monitoring to proactive capacity planning.

What's Next Part 2: Modern Infrastructure Monitoring and Observability in Checkmk 3.0
16:05–16:50

Martin Hirschvogel, Lars Michelsen & Torsten Engler

Strategic Talk

The next frontier for Checkmk is deep observability across the entire stack. In the second half of our roadmap reveal, we’ll explore how we are building native support for deeper application insights and network traffic analysis.

What we are building toward:

Deeper Application Observability: Our vision for deepening application-level visibility, making it easier to monitor services and business logic right out of the box.
The Path to Integrated Netflow: A look at how we plan to bring Netflow traffic analysis into the Checkmk interface, allowing you to align network health with actual traffic patterns for the first time.
A Modern Extension Framework: Our roadmap for a streamlined developer experience that will simplify how you create, deploy, and maintain custom monitoring extensions in 3.0.
Next-Gen Infrastructure Support: How we are evolving the core to better handle cloud-native environments and the "ephemeral" nature of modern hybrid-cloud architectures.

Goodbye from #CMKConf12
16:50–16:55

Jan Justus & Melina Weide

Watch the #CMKConf12 Livestream

Interaction

Agenda

Day 1

Day 2