It is used for the monitoring of servers, applications, networks, cloud infrastructures (public, private, hybrid), containers, storage, databases and environment sensors.

These Checkmk Editions are available for a range of platforms, in particular for various versions of Debian, Ubuntu, SLES and Red Hat, and also as a Docker Image.

[6] Checkmk originated in 2008 as an Agent-substituting shell script for Inetd, and was published in April 2009 under GPL.

{[citation needed] To simplify setup and operation, all components of Checkmk are delivered fully integrated.

[16] Checkmk is often used in very large distributed environments where a high number of sites (e.g., 300 locations of Faurecia[17]) and/or well over 100,000 devices (e.g. Edeka[18]) are monitored.

This is possible, among other things, because Checkmk's microcore consumes much less CPU resources than, for example, Nagios’, and therefore offers a significantly higher performance on the same hardware[original research?].

These include agents installed on the target system, "special agents" running on the monitoring server and communicating with the API of the target system, the SNMP API for monitoring, for example, network devices and printers, and HTTP/TCP protocols to communicate with web and internet services.

As an alternative, however, a "push" can be configured with which the system transfers its data directly to Checkmk or to an intermediate host.

For example, emails can be triggered at any time of the day, but notifications via SMS are sent only for important issues during on-call hours.

The notifications can be set for all or for specific teams, e.g. notify only the storage admins about a failed hard drive.

Checkmk includes integrations to email and SMS gateways as well as to communication and IT service-management solutions such as Slack, Jira, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, VictorOps, and ServiceNow.

It aggregates the overall status of business processes, their dependency on complex applications and IT infrastructure elements from many individual hosts and services in a rule-based manner.

In addition, worst-case scenarios can be simulated in real time and historical data can be analyzed to understand the causes of performance degradation.

{[citation needed] The Event Console integrates the processing of log messages and SNMP traps into the monitoring.

From CEE version 1.5p16 there is also a plug-in available for integrating data directly from Checkmk into Grafana for visualization purposes.

It includes the availability analysis in which the history of the states over any desired time period can be provided with a click.

Availability calculations can exclude unmonitored times, adjust the resolution, or ignore short intervals.