Share your experience using Pandora FMS

We use its latest version to monitor all our Windows and Linux servers.

This product has been really good for us. We took a chance with this open-source product with an enterprise offering. It has been very effective for what we monitor; servers, networking switches, fiber channel switches, web apps, etc...

It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. 

You can also use checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for hundreds of metrics. There is a long list of different ones from Nagios. You can just use them, and within seconds, you get yourself a check that is monitoring whatever you need. It is really flexible. I guess that's why they call it Pandora Flexible Monitoring System (FMS).

It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. Our network guy just recently asked about a particular protocol to monitor the bandwidth on the network, which is not a common protocol. When I looked it up, and I found that they cover it. It seems mature for a not-so-known product.

Their support is good, but it is just online communication. It would be great to be able to just call someone and talk to them instead of always writing. It works well for if you're a decent communicator in email, but some people might find it difficult to describe in a written fashion and communicate with them that way. 

There is a learning curve to the interface, but once you get used to it, it works well. They've made changes so it is getting better. They can refine the upgrade of agents to be easier. They can also do more refinement in end-user usability because not everyone is strong technically, and people who aren't strong technically might be averse to the product, even though it has come a long way.

I have been using this solution for five to ten years. 

Stability is where they shine. It has been super stable. We have high-end monitoring for our data centers. We monitor all kinds of metrics in our two data centers. We monitor maybe over 2,500 checks, and the product that has been successful and always alerting us is Pandora. Even though we have other products that are supposed to give us proper alerting for temperature sensors in the data center, it is Pandora that sends the alerts.

It is fine for us so far. It probably scales well. We have almost 350 agents with about 2600 checks running on one server, and it is still running fine. I don't know when we'll reach a point where we need to expand.

They definitely have the ability to have multiple servers and redundancy. We're looking at setting up a second one so that one is running in our second data center.

It is mostly used by our IT back-office team. We are the ones most interested in its alerts. For some check we have our Maintenance & Facilities staff alerted like temperature sensors in the data centers. You can just find the OID for temperature sensors on your network switches to get those metric in addition to pointing directly to the CRAC units for even more data (humidity, ...)

Their support is good. It is just online communication. I don't know if I've ever had a remote session with them. They're Spanish, so there might be a language barrier, but their English is still very strong. I have opened cases with them, and they're very good.

I would rate them a ten out of ten for their willingness to help and for their knowledge. The gap really is the lack of phone contact. For that, I would rate them an eight out of ten.

We tried a few different products at the time. We had a quick look at Nagios, which was config-based as opposed to a database. Pandora FMS seemed to offer the easiest way to monitor. 

The other products were on a smaller scale. We had some products that just dropped an agent and sent you an email straight from that server but nothing central.

It used to be complex, but I just upgraded it, and it is pretty good. I used their CentOS ISO for deployment and built the server directly with what they provide. I find it much easier. You should be comfortable with Linux.

They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it.

You should definitely look at it. It is good so far, and it does the job for a mid-size organization like ours.

I would rate Pandora FMS a nine out of ten.

My primary use case is the daily monitoring of all the network traffic for my bank client. With it, I supervise and monitor more than one hundred nodes and servers of all kinds, such as print servers, file servers, etc. From Pandora, I can have everything controlled and under continuous supervision. I supervise maintenance and optimization of the network infrastructure from Pandora.
When we want to monitor a new server or a new machine installed in the pandora network, it detects it automatically and we already have it monitored.

It is very easy and practical to work with this tool and is very useful to have at all times controlled what happens on the network.

You can also monitor services published on the network.

It is very practical to detect possible points of failure in the network.

In short it is a great tool for any network administrator whatever the size of the infrastructure of your network, it will help you to have everything under control.

Totally recommended and even recommended.

Thanks to Pandora FMS, we have greatly improved our client's network supervision.

It helps us to detect problems very quickly. We can see where the problem is and it gives us the tools to solve it quickly. We have everything centralized in the same application and at a glance, we can detect problems and solve them.

What I value most about Pandora FMS is the simplicity of working with it.

The speed of locating problems and to be able to solve them quickly, so that it affects our client's network infrastructure as little as possible, is very valuable.

Thanks to Pandora FMS we have everything unified in the same point and it is highly efficient.

This software is used to monitor several elements in the network, for example, it can detect if a network interface has been down, if it has received a defacement attack in unaweb, it alerts if there has been a memory loss in any application server; among its characteristics it allows to interact with other applications or platforms in the web and it can also send SMS if a system fails or alert about changes of an application in the web.Pandora FMS can collect information from any operating system, using specific agents for each platform, which collect data and send them to the server. Specific agents are used for GNU/Linux, AIX, Solaris, and Windows 2000, XP, 7, 2003 and 2008. Among its characteristics you can monitor services over TCP/IP protocol, without installing agents, you can also monitor network systems such as load balancers, routers, switches, operating systems, applications or printers. Pandora FMS also supports WMI to communicate directly with Windows systems remotely and SNMP to collect data orecibir traps.it can supervise the resources of devices such as processor load, disk use and RAM memory, analyzes the processes that are running in the system, in general can receive information from anything that can be collected automatically.

The free version capable of monitoring more than 10,000 nodes and covers (without limitations) a monitoring network, servers (based on agents or remotely) and applications. With complete functionalities of reports, alerts, integrations with third parties via API, etc.
It creates its own architecture from 0, which allows it to scale perfectly in large environments. It has been possible to monitor an environment with more than 100,000 nodes without performance problems (of course, in the Enterprise version).
We also highlight its integration with mobile devices, not only to access the console but also to monitor them thanks to its geolocation system.

The only bad thing is that in the Community version that is completely free could expand the number of nodes to monitor, otherwise is a great tool

five years.

The stability of this product is very good.

This solution is very scalable.

The support team are very good partners and are always willing to help, whatever the problem.

We used SolarWinds before switching to this solution.

The initial setup was simple and hassle-free.

We implemented this using a team provided by our supplier.

We have seen a return on investment of 300%.

This product is more expensive.

We only evaluated this solution, as well as SolarWinds.