What this lab is

The practice environment for the Checkmk Synthetic Monitoring Quickstart.

Two machines, on purpose:

cmk	A Checkmk site, already installed and started
host	A plain Linux machine with systemd — where you work, and what Checkmk monitors

In a real setup the monitoring server and the monitored host are never the same computer, and everything from module 2 onwards depends on them being separate.

Checkmk is preinstalled because installing Checkmk is not what this course teaches. Everything that is — RCC, the Checkmk agent, the Robotmk scheduler — you install yourself, with the same commands you would use at work.

Before you start

The test drives Roboland, a little point-of-sale application. You need your own workspace key; the form on that page issues one against an e-mail address and it lasts 30 days.

Put it in the environment, never in the suite file:

export ROBOLAND_KEY=your-five-groups

A key pasted into roboland.robot gets committed by accident, and then it lives in your repository. If the variable is missing, the test says so in plain words instead of failing on a selector.

Running the test

The suite lives in examples/web-roboland/, as a first-class example the lab borrows rather than owns:

cd examples/web-roboland
rcc task shell        # builds the environment on first use, then drops you into it
robot suite.robot

The first rcc task shell takes a few minutes — it is fetching a Python, Node, Robot Framework, the Browser library and a browser, and assembling them into an environment of their own. Every later start is seconds.

The browser opens where you can see it — on the noVNC desktop, port 6080.

One limit worth knowing before module 2

The Checkmk in this lab is a commercial edition, fully usable for testing — nobody runs this container in production, and nothing here is crippled. It has exactly one boundary, and it is easy to walk into by accident:

At most three Robotmk test services may be discovered. Discover a fourth and all of them turn CRIT — not the new one, all of them. Each test service also brings roughly five keyword services with it, so the number of services grows faster than the number of tests.

If everything suddenly goes red at once and nothing changed in the application, count your discovered tests before you look for anything else.

Libraries and Versions used in this example

Library	Version
Python	3.12
Node.js	22.11.0
Robot Framework	7.4
robotframework-browser	19.14.2

About

Also try the other RF example suites, they all work in the Codespace environment.

🪲 Found a bug or have a suggestion?
→ Open an issue or submit a pull request — contributions are welcome.

📖 Want to go deeper? Want ot get a certified professional?
→ I offer Synthetic Monitoring Trainings or book a free call.

Simon Meggle — Founder of Robotmk, Product Manager Synthetic Monitoring at Checkmk

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