Pandora FMS Reviews

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.

We use it to monitor the client's system, database models, operating system models, and SAP.

We are consultants and thanks to Pandora can detect a lot of disasters that other companies can't. We can offer high availability of the system to the client.

The administration of the console is very easy. I like that Pandora FMS is interactive and easy to manage.

The company that supports Pandora is called Artica, and it is a Spanish company. They are working on improving this software, and communicating with them has been easy as well. If we need a specific model of SAP, for example, they will work on a new plugin or a new tool.

Pandora FMS is relatively new, and the interface with the older version crashes at times. We have several different operating systems, such as Linux and Windows, and Pandora does not run as well in these.

In the next release, I would like to be able to customize the dashboard. Right now, the list of latest events is limited to 60. I would like to be able to customize this value.

I've been using it for two years.

It is stable, and it doesn't need a lot of maintenance. 

Pandora FMS is very scalable. For example, we migrated a lot of virtual machines that were monitored in Nagios or Centreon. The migration to Pandora was so easy.

We currently have 58 users.

The technical support is excellent. They are experts and are kind. I would give them an eight out of ten.

Positive

We used Centreon before Pandora FMS. We chose Pandora FMS because it has more opportunities with SAP monitoring, and that was our main objective.

It's not too difficult to implement but has a lot of documentation. You don't have to have advanced knowledge to implement it. This is an advantage over other solutions such as Nagios.

The deployment take a year or less. For a medium or multinational company, two or three persons are enough to maintain the solution.

We implemented it ourselves.

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.

We thought about Zabbix but decided to move with Pandora.

I would encourage you to use Pandora FMS because you can monitor systems on the cloud. You can use Pandora with Azure, Amazon Web Service, and Google Cloud Platform. It is easier to implement and monitor virtual machines and other type of systems in this cloud infrastructure.

I am very happy with Pandora FMS and would give it a rating of eight on a scale from one to ten.

I use Pandora FMS to monitor IT infrastructure, applications, and some business processes. Our clients range in size. For example, one of the bigger environments I'm supporting has about 3,000 devices, including router servers, applications, etc. The smaller client has roughly a hundred. 

Pandora's architecture is interesting. It's open so you can easily extend and enhance it. It's simpler to customize Pandora compared to other solutions. It's also scalable enough to support large environments.

Pandora could deliver better analytics out of the box. You can work around these limitations with the help of other tools like Grafana. The shortcomings are mostly on the graphical side. The built-in report generators are a bit limited in some areas. 

They could improve their management console's ability to monitor large environments could be improved. For example, SNMP management is only partially integrated into the management console.

I have been using Pandora FMS for the last three years.

Pandora is stable.

Pandora is scalable.

Pandora FMS support is good. They're capable and address things quickly.

I did some stuff with Tivoli from IBM. Pandora has advantages in terms of price and extendability. Tivoli is a bit better at correlation handling. The correlation engine was stronger in the IBM product.

The difficulty of the setup depends on the environment, but it's pretty straightforward in a small environment. The time required for deployment also depends on the environment. It takes about half a day for a smaller environment with a hundred similar servers. If you are talking about 1,000-plus servers distributed over various zones, the setup time increases. We have three or four admins to deploy and maintain the solution plus our 24/7 operations.

Pandora is reasonably priced, and the cost depends on the environment.

I rate Pandora FMS nine out of 10. My advice to future Pandora users is to understand what you want to monitor and know your technologies.

We use this product's search and review functionality to stabilize the infrastructure software.

The monitoring system within this solution is very good. It is easy to use and navigate, and makes issue alarms easily viewable.

We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of.

We would also like more process documentation to be added to the cloud.

We have used this solution for five years.

We have found this solution to be very stable during our time using it.

The support is excellent for this product; their response time is very fast, and they are very knowledgeable.

Positive

The solution was very easy to setup and implement. The documentation provided on the setup process is very good.

We implemented this solution using an integrator.

We would recommend organizations to use an integrator for the implementation of this solution. It made the process very quick and easy.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10.

We use this solution for network monitoring.

The network monitoring and configuration within this solution is very good.

The product also has good customization options.

We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution.

We would also like some improvements to be made to the WinRM configuration file that this solution uses.

We have been working with this solution for two years.

The stability of this solution is good. However, we have found that we occasionally get false alerts for our on-premises servers.

The support for this solution has been good whenever tickets are raised.

Positive

We chose to move to this solution due to how cost effective it is, and how easy it is to use.

The initial setup of this product is quite straightforward, if you have experience with Linux commands.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is configuration of metrics. We are customers of Pandora. I'm the IT project manager and ERP system specialist. 

The solution has good dashboards and graphics. It helps with supporting operations in telecommunications. 

The product lacks APIs for integration with other systems and we have issues with monitoring. 

The solution is scalable, we have around 70 users in our company. 

Customer support could be improved. 

Neutral

The initial setup is relatively easy. The initial setup takes around one hour. 

Pricing is reasonable. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10.