Checkmk vs Robusta

Checkmk monitors cloud, hybrid, and data center infrastructure, including containers and networks. For web, mail, and database servers, it combines more than 2,000 smart checks with automatic discovery and network mapping. Monitoring can use native agents for Windows, Linux, and other systems, agentless SNMP and TCP/UDP checks, or API-based checks over HTTP/XML, SSH, or TELNET. Cloud coverage includes AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, with automatic component detection and Quick Setup. One instance can monitor thousands of servers, while distributed monitoring supports horizontal scaling. Community includes more than 2,000 integrations and is intended for smaller environments, scaling to approximately 100 hosts. The software can run on customer hardware or virtualized infrastructure, with Linux distribution packages, Docker, and a Virtual Appliance. The Community plan is free forever and includes community support. The pricing note lists paid plans from €190/mo (annual) and a 30-day trial. Other listed plan prices use USD: Pro is $275 a month, Cloud is $290 a month, and Ultimate is $400 a month. Platforms include API, Linux, macOS, self-hosted, web, and Windows.

Robusta is an AI SRE offered through SaaS, a customer VPC deployment, or full self-hosting with the customer’s own LLM key. It learns an environment, groups duplicate alerts, filters noise, and surfaces new issues. When an alert arrives, its AI investigates root cause and blast radius, proposes a fix, and escalates to a human when needed. Alerts can enter through webhooks, HTTP requests, or MCP events, with listed tools including Prometheus AlertManager, Grafana, Datadog, PagerDuty, and Jira. Holmes provides native integrations for Kubernetes, OpenShift, AWS, Azure, GCP, Prometheus, Grafana, PostgreSQL, GitHub, and ServiceNow. Other sources can connect through MCP servers or HTTP APIs, including generated HTTP connectors. Customers may use their own models and API keys and disable Robusta-hosted models. The agent is read-only by default; write access for auto-remediation is optional. Queries, log lines, and conclusions are logged and replayable. Robusta says customer data is not used for model training and that it is SOC 2 compliant. Pricing is on request.