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Elastic Observability vs Pandora FMS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Observability
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
15th
Ranking in Log Management
15th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (10th), Container Monitoring (5th)
Pandora FMS
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
58th
Ranking in Log Management
61st
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
44th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (76th), Server Monitoring (26th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 1.5%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Observability1.5%
Pandora FMS0.8%
Other97.7%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed-Abdelalim - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Has provided powerful customization for unique monitoring needs but needs more out-of-the-box capabilities
In my opinion, the best features of Elastic Observability are their flexibility to integrate with other existing systems and the ability to build a unified monitoring tool that can integrate with existing ones and end-to-end user journeys which require a lot of customizations. The greatest feature in Elastic is the ability to customize. This is similar to my comments about customizable dashboards in Elastic because it's visible to the analyst. However, it's very great. Customizing these dashboards can meet the customer's specific use cases and specific stories that they have in their environment, their special environment that doesn't look like other environments. The dashboarding in Elastic is highly customizable to the level of logos. If the customer wants his company logo in the dashboard, it can be done.
Gabriel Glusgold - PeerSpot reviewer
Asociado/ at Infraestructura Informática
Personalized metrics; simplicity of data
My primary use case for Pandora is monitoring This solution has helped us improve our organization by allowing us to create a lot of metrics on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix. We then use these Pandora metrics to create an interface. We then pass the interface off to the…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning over a month from multiple data sources can be completed within seconds."
"The customizable dashboards in Elastic Observability allow us to group relevant data to specific aspects of our solution, giving us around 20 interlinked dashboards which provide an overview, and if one aspect shows weird behavior, we can focus on that specific aspect of our software with a dedicated dashboard."
"It is a powerful tool that allows users to collect and transform logs as needed, enabling flexible visualization and analysis."
"It is very stable, and I would rate it ten out of ten based on my interaction with it."
"The product has connectors to many services."
"The price is very less expensive compared to the other solutions."
"It's easy to deploy, and it's very flexible."
"All the features that we use, such as monitoring, dashboarding, reporting, the possibility of alerting, and the way we index the data, are important."
"Thanks to Pandora FMS, we've been able to adapt to every new monitoring challenge over the past seven years."
"I like this solution a lot because it has a very large Hispanic community and the platform looks very friendly."
"The most valuable features are auto-discovery and automatic detection of the network topology and network monitoring."
"Each of these points I think represents the keys as to why this software works in my jewelry stores, as it gives me greater control over all of the devices, the best performance, and I can interpret the data easily and much faster, with excellent results."
"The solution has good dashboards and graphics."
"Thanks to this software and to the work of the support team, we have everything under control."
"The network monitoring and configuration within this solution is very good."
"Features I have found most valuable with Pandora are the personalized metrics and the simplicity of data."
 

Cons

"The cost must be made more transparent."
"Simplifying the parsing of logs and manual efforts would also be beneficial."
"There's a steep learning curve if you've never used this solution before."
"The auto-discovery isn't nearly as good. That's a big portion of it. When you drop the agent onto the JVM and you're trying to figure things out, having to go through and manually do all that is cumbersome."
"There is room for improvement regarding its APM capabilities."
"Elastic Observability is an excellent product for monitoring and visibility, but it lacks predictive analytics. Most solutions are aligned with the AIOps requirements, but this piece is missing in Elastic and should be included."
"Elastic Observability is difficult to use. There are only three options for customization but this can be difficult for our use case. We do not have other options to choose the metrics shown, such as CPU or memory usage."
"I am familiar with Azure Monitor, which I find more user-friendly compared to Elastic, which is a very technical tool."
"We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution."
"It would be useful if Pandora FMS included an ISO image (or «software appliance») for each big company that leases virtual private machines (VPS), just like in AWS."
"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
"The product lacks APIs for integration with other systems."
"An update to the Android app would be appreciated."
"The price for Pandora FMS is expensive."
"This solution requires proper training to get 100% out of it."
"We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now."
"We have been using the open-source version."
"The price of Elastic Observability is expensive."
"The product is not that cheap."
"Pricing is one of those situations where the more you use it, the more you pay."
"We will buy a premium license after POC."
"There are two types: cloud and SaaS. They charge based on data ingestion, ingest rate, hard retention, and warm retention. I believe it costs around $25,000 annually to ingest 30GB of data daily. That is the SaaS version. There is also a self-managed license where the customer manages their own infrastructure on-prem. In such cases, there are three license tiers that respectively cost $5,000 annually per node, $7,000 per node, and $12,500 per node."
"Elastic Observability is cheaper than other similar solutions, such as Dynatrace. Its license calculation is based on various factors like data volume and physical infrastructure, particularly related to RAM capacity."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"My rule of thumb would be that if you need more than thirty agents, and you lack an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet, you will save a lot of time and money going to the Enterprise edition."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"You have to pay for the number of agents and models that you are monitoring. I would rate the cost at three with one being the most expensive and five being the cheapest."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
The problem is their licensing model, which is a bit confusing. Many customers struggle to understand their total cost of ownership because Elastic licensing is not dependent on easy, quantifiable ...
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
After careful consideration about areas for improvement in Elastic Observability, aspects such as pricing, customization, implementation, and scalability could be improved. As a user of the system,...
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Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Observability vs. Pandora FMS and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.