Checkmk Appliance Naming Convention

Owned by Matthew Hierholzer
Last updated: Dec 21, 2023
2 min read

This document defines the naming convention for the Checkmk Appliance.


Table of Contents

Structure

The structure of the name is as follows:

Checkmk [type name (lowercase)][size number] Mark [generation number (roman notation)]


The Type

The first part of an appliance name is the type name, e.g., rack or virt. This refers loosely to the way it is mounted in the datacenter. In the beginning there was also another model, but these days only rack is relevant. For the virtual appliance, we use virt.

Attached to the rack, you will find a number, which indicates the rough hardware layout in terms of how much workload it can handle. At the time of writing, we have, e.g., two models: rack1 and rack4. The 1 tells us, it is a small-sized system, while the 4 tells us it is a bigger one and can handle roughly 4 times the workload of rack1.


The Mark

The mark differentiates between different generations of the same type. Consider, for example, our hardware vendor changes a significant part of the hardware layout, or we change the hardware vendor itself. While the sizing remains the same, we need to be able to express this change in the naming.

As a rule of thumb, the “mark” needs to be increased, if we need to adapt the firmware to work with the updated hardware.


Putting it together

Now to put things together, let's consider some examples:

  • Checkmk rack1 Mark I: This is the very first generation of the smallest appliance available.
  • Checkmk rack1 Mark V: This is the fifth generation of the smallest appliance available, which means the components built into the configuration have changed significantly, at least four times.
  • Checkmk rack4 Mark I: This is the very first generation of the bigger appliance.
  • Checkmk rack4 Mark III: This is the third generation of the bigger appliance, which means the components built into this configuration have changed significantly, at least two times.