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Pandora FMS OverviewUNIXBusinessApplication

Pandora FMS is #11 ranked solution in top Server Monitoring tools, #14 ranked solution in top Cloud Monitoring Software, #20 ranked solution in best Network Monitoring Tools, and #20 ranked solution in Infrastructure Monitoring tools. PeerSpot users give Pandora FMS an average rating of 10 out of 10. Pandora FMS is most commonly compared to Zabbix: Pandora FMS vs Zabbix. Pandora FMS is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 53% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a comms service provider, accounting for 26% of all views.
Buyer's Guide

Download the Network Monitoring Software Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: July 2022

What is Pandora FMS?

Pandora FMS is a monitoring as a service (MaaS) solution that is ideal for companies with at least 100 or more devices. Instead of multiple, difficult-to-integrate monitoring systems, Pandora FMS is an all-in-one solution that is easy to use. The software is able to untangle complicated technology infrastructures to easily identify the root cause of issues in order to find the most efficient solution. It does so by analyzing everything in your system, from databases and applications to services and desktops, as well as communications.

Pandora FMS Features

Pandora FMS has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

  • Application Monitoring (APM)
  • IoT monitoring
  • Log collection
  • Inventory
  • Issue management / ITSM
  • Mainframe monitoring
  • Network monitoring
  • Remote control
  • Synthetic monitoring
  • Service oriented monitoring
  • Server monitoring
  • User experience monitoring
  • Virtualization & cloud

Pandora FMS Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Pandora FMS. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

  • Comprehensive overview: Pandora FMS provides a comprehensive overview of your system to make troubleshooting easy. It also provides all the tools to monitor and analyze an extensive range of data, from traffic to connectivity.
  • Easy forecasting: With Pandora FMS, you can use your network diagram for forecasting solutions, which gives you the necessary info you need to perform maintenance. 
  • Proactive solutions: Issues are proactively addressed. Pandora FMS provides alerts 24/7 so you can deal with problems before they grow even bigger. This also helps your organization eliminate any down time. 
  • Solve future problems: Another benefit of implementing Pandora FMS is that it enables you to optimize your services to ensure that future issues are minimized. In addition, they offer around-the-clock monitoring and automated solutions. As a result, the solution enables you to operate your organization with maximum efficiency all the time, saving you money and time. 
  • Personalized service maps: Pandora FMS allows you to create detailed, personalized service maps that can help you identify any shortcomings in your system and address them as soon as possible. 
  • SLA and availability reports: With Pandora FMS, you receive critical alerts when SLA levels aren’t met, which also helps you understand when your applications and systems are not meeting your business goals.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Pandora FMS solution.

PeerSpot user Marc C., Systems Analyst at a university, says, "It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. It is really flexible. It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. It is very mature for a not-so-known product."

Another reviewer, Alexandre J., comments, “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.”

Pandora FMS Customers

Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes

Pandora FMS Video

Pandora FMS Pricing Advice

What users are saying about Pandora FMS pricing:
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."

Pandora FMS Reviews

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MC
Systems Analyst at a university with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Top 10
Download
Super stable, very flexible, feature-rich, competitive price, and does the job
Pros and Cons
  • "It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. 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 is very 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 me because I am 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 is actually very powerful. They have a lot of options, but people struggle with the interface. They've improved it though, and it is getting better. They need to keep improving the learning curve to help buy-in. I'm the guy that manages it, so I'm comfortable with it. They can refine the upgrade 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. It has a complete GUI and everything."

What is our primary use case?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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...

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.
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July 2022
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610,812 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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, ...)

How are customer service and support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Alexandre Pérez Jorge - PeerSpot reviewer
User
Real User
Download
Single-point continuous supervision makes it efficient for detecting and solving problems
Pros and Cons
  • "What I value most about Pandora FMS is the simplicity of working with it."
  • "The price for Pandora FMS is expensive."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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 is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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


For how long have I used the solution?

five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of this product is very good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This solution is very scalable.

How are customer service and support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used SolarWinds before switching to this solution.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was simple and hassle-free.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented this using a team provided by our supplier.

What was our ROI?

We have seen a return on investment of 300%.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

This product is more expensive.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We only evaluated this solution, as well as SolarWinds.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Buyer's Guide
Download our free Network Monitoring Software Report and find out what your peers are saying about Artica Soluciones Tecnologicas, Zabbix, Nagios, and more!
Updated: July 2022
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Buyer's Guide
Download our free Network Monitoring Software Report and find out what your peers are saying about Artica Soluciones Tecnologicas, Zabbix, Nagios, and more!
Buyer's Guide
Network Monitoring Software
July 2022
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