Patchmon – patch monitoring done right
We watch everything. CPU, memory, disk, services, certificates. Our dashboards light up the moment any of them twitch. But the one question that actually decides whether a server gets breached; “is it patched?” That blind spot is where PatchMon began. In August 2025 Muhammad Ibrahim was supposed to be on holiday. Instead, he was worrying about 70 Linux servers whose patch state he couldn’t see, spread across distros that each report differently. So he built something to answer one question across all of them: what needs updating, where, and how badly? The first version shipped that September without even a login screen. Five months later it was running on 4,000+ installations watching 55,000+ servers, with 80+ contributors and a Discord that took on a life of its own.
In December 2025, Mattias Schlenker was approached by Checkmk users asking about this promising new patch monitoring project – and how to integrate it into their infrastructure monitoring. Knowing about the pain points of all the differing solutions to monitor patch states for differing operating systems (even across differing Linux distributions), he was immediately caught. At FOSDEM 2026, Muhammad Ibrahim and Mattias Schlenker finally met and discussed a collaboration in a true Open Source way: Enhancing the APIs of PatchMon to be able to fully integrate as checks for infrastructure monitoring. A few months later, 500+ Checkmk installations integrate with PatchMon servers.
This joint talk from Muhammad Ibrahim and Mattias Schlenker covers the evolution of PatchMon and a collaboration that easily opens PatchMon data for the users of infrastructure monitoring like Checkmk, Ichinga, Nagios and Zabbix. Along the way, you’ll learn about design choices that mattered shifting from operational visibility to operational intelligence, the fragmentation of patch visibility and the challenges of negotiating APIs between Open Source projects.
Speakers
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Mattias SchlenkerCheckmk GmbHMattias Schlenker has been a freelance author in IT journalism and technical writer for 18 years before joining Checkmk GmbH as full time employee for team knowledge. His freelance legacy includes two books on Arduino and technical writing for Watterott Electronic GmbH.
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Muhammad IbrahimPatchMon LTDIby has spent 20 years in IT, from hands-on Infra engineering to founding a UK managed-services group, experience that led him to build PatchMon, the open-source Linux patch-management project now running on thousands of servers worldwide.