Overview

Checkmate is designed to run on modest hardware with a small memory footprint. Thanks to extensive optimizations, it requires minimal memory and CPU resources even when monitoring hundreds of servers.

Hardware requirements

Checkmate runs comfortably on:

Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 — suitable for small deployments
Any Linux VPS with 1+ GB RAM
macOS or Windows machines for development

For a production deployment monitoring 300+ servers every minute, the Node.js instance uses minimal memory. MongoDB and Redis on the same server use approximately 400 MB and 15 MB respectively.

Storage requirements

Disk usage scales with the number of monitors and check frequency. As a reference:

Monitors	Check interval	Monthly storage
300 servers	Every 1 second	~3 GB/month

This translates to roughly 36 GB annually at that scale. Most deployments with less frequent checks will use significantly less storage.

Data retention

Checkmate maintains a default data retention policy of 90 days. You can adjust this through Settings > Monitor history to retain data for longer or shorter periods based on your needs.

Database compression

Checkmate uses MongoDB, which supports two compression methods:

Method	Trade-off	Best for
Snappy (default)	Lower CPU usage, moderate compression	Most deployments
Zlib	Higher compression ratio, more CPU	Storage-constrained environments

Snappy is the default and works well for the majority of deployments. Switch to Zlib only if storage is a primary concern and you have CPU headroom.

Network requirements

Outbound HTTP/HTTPS — for uptime checks to monitored endpoints
Port 52345 (default) — for the Checkmate application
Port 27017 — for MongoDB (internal)
Port 59232 — for Capture agent communication (if using infrastructure monitoring)

If you're monitoring internal services behind a firewall, ensure Checkmate's server can reach those endpoints on the required ports.

Server requirements