Checkmk Raw Is Called Community

The Checkmk download picker no longer offers Raw. Community sits in that slot. Pro sits where Enterprise sat. Ultimate with Multi-Tenancy sits where MSP sat. If you still search for a Raw .deb, you are a version behind the shop.

Afrida Mahbub wrote the rename on 17 March. Their reason, not a catalog gloss:

You told us that Checkmk Enterprise sounded like our “top” edition, Checkmk Cloud (self-hosted) was often mistaken for a SaaS product, and Checkmk MSP seemed exclusively for managed service providers.

— checkmk.com/blog/meet-new-checkmk-lineup, 17 March 2026

Checkmk GmbH in Munich ships IT monitoring. The product is a site you install: it discovers hosts, turns each into a pile of services, and alerts when a check fails. The homepage dashboard is the argument. Hosts and services as coloured rings. Problem notifications on a 24-hour chart. A list of noisy boxes. That is the job. Not a pretty Grafana board you still have to feed.

How you actually run it

Linux package, Docker, or the appliance. Windows gets the appliance, not a native server. You create a site with omd. Add a host. Discovery walks the agent or SNMP and writes services: filesystems, ports, CPU, whatever the plugin list knows. Activate changes. Alerts fire from those services, not from the hostname. Agent Bakery, on the paid editions, bakes the agent with the plugins you picked so you are not copying configs by hand.

Community is the open-source edition. Their homepage card: easily scalable up to about 100 hosts, 2,000-plus integrations, forum support, 100 percent open source. Pro adds distributed monitoring, the faster microcore, reporting, and 8×5 tickets. Ultimate is the old self-hosted Cloud name: OpenTelemetry, Relay, the extended cloud checks, 10×5 with an optional 24×5 add-on. The SaaS card on the homepage now reads CloudAI. The FAQ still says Checkmk Cloud. Same product. Frankfurt or Northern Virginia for residency. You pick the region. You do not pick a hybrid of the two.

2.5.0 is the major that locked the names into the packages. Werk 19391: identifiers raw and cre become community. Enterprise and cee become pro. A 2.4 site still ran old package names with new titles in the UI. 2.5 changed the files. The 24 August patch on their forum is 2.5.0p12. Native OpenTelemetry in that series is labelled in one line: available in Checkmk Ultimate and Checkmk Cloud. Pro does not get it. Relay is the same gate: a small outbound-only container, mTLS, no inbound hole, Ultimate and Cloud only. Explain with AI is Cloud only.

The slider says hosts. The invoice says services.

Open Pricing with Euro selected. Community is free. Pro, at 100 monitored hosts, is from €190 a month billed annually, printed as about €1.90 per host. Ultimate at the same slider is from €275, about €2.75 per host. Under the slider: equivalent to about 3,000 services. CloudAI on the SaaS column is €240 a month at 1,000 services, printed as about €7.20 per host, with the line 1 host = about 30 services. The host number is a sizing hint. The contract counts checks.

Their FAQ, expanded on that page:

Infrastructure Monitoring is priced by the number of services you monitor. A service is any individual aspect of a host — for example, a file system, a hardware sensor, a switch port, or a specific metric like CPU usage.

— checkmk.com/pricing, How is Infrastructure Monitoring priced, and what is a Service?

Application observability is not a Pro add-on. It is bundled in Ultimate and Cloud and counted as custom metrics, one allotment matched to the service count. Synthetic tests are an add-on on Pro and Ultimate. Cloud does not include them. After a self-hosted trial expires, the site keeps running in Free mode: 750 services, one site. Upgrade in place from Community to Pro or Ultimate. Do not plan a lift from a self-hosted site into Checkmk Cloud. The FAQ is blunt: migration is not supported in either direction.

Who should not install this. Anyone whose plan is OpenTelemetry on the Pro invoice: that collector is the next card. Anyone who needs synthetic journeys on the SaaS edition: buy self-hosted Pro or Ultimate, or skip the tests. Anyone who wanted to grow Community into Cloud later without redoing the estate. Anyone whose unlicensed Pro site is supposed to jump straight to 2.5. Anyone who thought Grafana was the monitoring layer: Grafana is on the integration list. Checkmk is the checks.

If the job is discovering a fleet and paging on services, start with the listing, then Downloads, then Pricing with the currency you will actually pay. Look for Community. Raw is a former name.

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