[CheckMK] What folder structure should we be using?

[leefaisonr]

We have set up the staging CheckMK folder structure as follows:

Top level - 1 folder per OS type (Windows, Linux, cloud)
Within Linux - 1 folder per team and the shared folder (for things like solr, tower)

This structure might work well for creating dashboard reports for each team.
Are there other requirements?

Also, where do we want to store the values for the checkmk_folder variable? This variable determines which folder a new host should be added to. Currently, this is set on the command line.

[acozine]

Requirements (from the Ansible Open House today):

• our folder structure should simplify notifications - alerts for issues on VMs for a specific project should go to the correct team, and also to a shared channel
• our folder structure should simplify adding checks - it should be easy to add a new check to all rails servers, for example - we might be able to do this with inventory in Princeton_ansible, or with folders in CheckMK
• our folder structure should support dashboards - one per team, other combinations
• our folder structure should support shared checks for similar services (for example, rails checks) - every check lives in folders - could we have folders that do not have hosts but DO have checks/rules?

[VickieKarasic]

We realized that CheckMK Support buys us more access to dashboards, so once we agree on folder structure, we can likely have them set up dashboards to match that structure.

[carolyncole]

I haven't wished for a different structure... The only other structure I can thunk of would be group at top...

[VickieKarasic]

Thanks @carolyncole - so do you mean one more top-level group for say, Cloud (subfolders: GCP and AWS), OS (subfolders: Linux and Windows), etc.?

[VickieKarasic]

I think the work in #5265 and the work that @aruiz1789 will do in #5770 will address most of the requirements listed above. Thoughts @kayiwa and @acozine?

[acozine]

We have some stuff in staging CheckMK that isn't mentioned here yet - mostly hardware/hardware-ish stuff - what would make the most sense for those items? We currently have these folders:

• Hypervisors
• MgmtBoard_LOM
• SNMP Devices
• Websites (Certs) [can this one go, now that we have a new way of monitoring certs?]
  Would it make sense to have a top-level folder called Hardware or Datacenter? What would the sub-folders be?