# Checkmk Business Intelligence Backend

The Checkmk Business Intelligence (BI) Backend is used to connect NagVis directly with the aggregations configured within Checkmk BI.

## The Checkmk BI API

Checkmk BI offers a webservice which is called by HTTP GET requests and responds with JSON objects.

## Representation in NagVis

This backend is a special one compared to the other backends which handle Nagios status information 1:1. This backend only handles Checkmk BI aggregations as dedicated object.

The backend only provides information for objects of the type `aggr`, which has been introduced to represent aggregation objects.

The aggregations objects link (left click on icon) are automatically set by the mkbi backend to point to the Checkmk Web-GUI, except when the `url` parameter of the aggr object is configured to point to another map (e.g. `[htmlbase]/index.php?mod=Map&act=view&show=bi-webshop-details`).

## Configuration

You can use the following parameters to configure the Checkmk BI backend:

Value | Default | Description
--- | --- | ---
base_url | http://localhost/[site_id]/check_mk/ | The full base URL to the `view.py` script which is part of Checkmk. It serves the AJAX-API which the backend connects to. This URL must be reachable from the host NagVis is running on.
site_internal_auth | 0 | Use the so called site internal authentication introduced with Checkmk 2.4. The site internal secret is automatically derived from the Checkmk sites environment.
auth_user |  | User to use for authentication when accessing the `base_url`. It has to be created within Checkmk as "automation" user in order to configure a backend which is allowed to retrieve Checkmk BI states. Used for the automation authentication together with auth_secret or auth_secret_file. This was the authentication mechanism until Checkmk 2.3.
auth_secret |  | The authentication secret configured within Checkmk for the given user.
auth_secret_file |  | Read the authentication secret configured within Checkmk for the given user from this path.
verify_peer | 1 | New in 1.9.34: Whether to verify the certificate the HTTPS server is providing.
ca_path |  | New in 1.9.34: Location of Certificate Authority file on local filesystem which should be used with the verify_peer context option to authenticate the identity of the remote peer.
timeout | 5 | New in 1.9b11: This option controls the request timeout of the HTTP requests to Checkmk BI.

There are also some general backend parameters. You can read about them in main configuration format description.