Pandora FMS Reviews

We use this solution to monitor our institutional network.

This tool has been of great help because we can manage faster solutions with the problems in our network and it helped us reduce our response time.

The most valuable features are auto-discovery and automatic detection of the network topology and network monitoring. In our institution, it is most important that our network is stable because otherwise, we cannot provide services.

It would be helpful to include the generation of reports for times that the network was out of service. Such a report should include the name of the network, the start time of the fault, the end time of the fault, and the total time out of service.

We have been using this solution for three years.

Our primary use case is the monitoring and control of IT infrastructure.

Pandora FMS is a powerful monitoring system that has enabled us to identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems before they affect critical business processes.

The most valuable feature is the single monitoring solution. We are able to control our business with this all-in-one monitoring tool.

Third-party integration should be improved for some commonly used products such as Universal CMDB.

In comparison with most monitoring software, this software is incredibly easy to use. It does 95% of what we want it to and the remainder is currently waiting on new features that have been added to the roadmap.

Although the version I use is not the enterprise, Pandora FMS allows our company to accurately maintain an up to the minute, easy to digest visual on inventory and security throughout our network for certain industry compliance of workstations and servers.

Being a solution running on Linux, it gives us an excellent relationship between hardware requirements and the number of agents that can be managed effectively. It supports up to two thousand agents using less than 4GB of RAM, which today is a fairly modest amount.

This solution is able to fulfill any task of monitoring and control of hosts in an outstanding way.

It has a really complete Wiki and documentation, where they explain from the purpose to the configuration and use of its immense number of functions.

It allows me to quickly see the status of all of my printers, switches, computers, and virtual machines to determine if any system has fallen.

In its versions for Linux, in the beginning, it can be somewhat complicated to configure and implement. The Windows version is easier to configure but less stable in my opinion.

This solution requires proper training to get 100% out of it.

The life cycle seems to be very short, but you get what you pay for.

The Windows version is less stable than the Linux version.

The Linux version is more difficult to install and configure than the Windows version.

The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures.

We use it for "remote desktop" via eHorus (integrated into console Pandora FMS), to check connectivity, for database status, and disk drive free space capacity. This solution is very useful for keeping track of «Let's Encrypt» certificates (expiration) for our web blog and its uptime.

Pandora FMS provides us with a general report (graphical) about all of the connected devices, which helps with planning new stations and tracking them. This solution also supports «IP address management» in an easy way, including an integrated IP calculator. Compatibility with the «Lightweight Directory Access Protocol» reduces the work required to handle our users and roles.

Enterprise version is for big business (100 devices or more); we use Community version (GNU General Public License) , both versions let us make own "details", always under our responsibility. Another valuable feature is standards for monitoring, where discrete values in generic situations can be applied to anything with very different needs.

Pandora FMS is currently very focused on monitoring so they have left out the issue of cloud deployment. After discussing it with support and in the forums, I have seen that they are working on improving their cloud side, and with the Discovery feature, which is still limited, I'm sure they will accomplish a lot more in the future.

This solution is very stable.

The solution provides for full scalability, including a schema for a High Availability Database Cluster.

We have had no need for service, as everything is explained in blog/wiki pages.

I have not previously used a monitoring tool beyond one that we designed in-house.

This initial setup of this solution is no problem. Everything is set up inside an ISO image, burned and installed into the machine. Of course, after installation, it needed to be adapted for our requirements.

We used an in-house team for the deployment.

Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available -if you have one hundred devices or more-. This is an open-source solution that can be used free of charge (Community edition). Libre Software can be let tasted and tried without compromise, no pressure for buying, and no more worries (we have too many of them).  Both case use same core, Enterprise version include additional plug-in's and there is total support for specialized cases.

There were no other options evaluated before choosing this solution.

There is a community of users at pandorafms.org where you can see errors that other people have experienced, in addition to a blog with technical articles. It is all very useful.

We used this solution for the deployment of a Linux and Windows mixed environment to keep track of the infrastructure and generate periodical capacity plannings, execution of personalized scripts on remote servers to collect data from in-house applications, and to centralize the monitoring of the whole infrastructure.

We were able to monitor the whole infrastructure, which allowed us to identify some glitches and adjust the schedules of some tasks to improve the execution of multiple processes. This translated into shortening the time of execution for the daily preconfigured tasks.

The most valuable features of this solution are the WMI integration for the agents, being able to execute personalized scripts, and the default implementation of Tentacle to keep the data transfer secure between agents and servers.

The solution is so lightweight that with only 4GB of ram, it allows keeping track of up to two hundred agents from a single console.

When it comes to the definition of local Software Agents for the first time in the open-source version, it can become very tedious. However, when using the Enterprise Version, we will be allowed to centralize the administration and deployment from the web console.

I haven't had any stability issues.

The solution is very flexible. It allows you to deploy servers individually, even in remote locations.

We haven't used technical support yet. We deployed the solution using the online documentation.

I used to use different software for my previous job. I didn't switch software, rather I just switched jobs.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was just a little bit slow because we started with the open-source version.

We implemented this solution in-house.

We moved from having twelve physical servers to only five and reduced the production time drastically.

The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest.

I did not evaluate other options, as I had already heard/read about this solution.

If you are looking for a really complete monitoring solution then you should consider this one.

I used this solution to monitor and control a network of jewelry stores. I use AI for the prevention and prediction of future problems in my company, especially in certain points that I could not control before, such as cameras and alarms.

The job of monitoring is to prevent and save on costs, and that's what Pandora does well. It has helped my company in this regard. Thanks to its flexibility, I have been able to adapt the tool to our servers and find out quickly how their console works.

They have also incorporated a substantial improvement in the management of internet protocol addresses, which makes things much easier.

The features that I find most valuable are:

• Flexible network administration
• Monitors service availability and response times
• Graphics system, exportable to PDF
• Integrated remote access through eHorus
• Complex and modular architecture
• Includes logistical support
• Strives to improve and make the user console much more usable and simple 

Each of these points I think represents the keys as to why this software works in my jewelry stores. It gives me greater control over all of the devices, the best performance, and I can interpret the data easily and much faster. The results are excellent. 

What could you say on this subject? I sincerely believe that Pandora needs new ideas for functionality closer to advanced device security monitoring.

This is my first time with monitoring software.

In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study. The best ratio of quality and price, I want to think.

I mostly read about other options but did not evaluate them.

This is the best solution if you don't want to get in trouble. Their project department has helped me at all times by adapting the software to the needs of my business. Even in the last implementation of the program, they have included a functionality that I asked for myself.

Until very recently they didn't have good multi-tenancy monitoring, but they're moving fast and they've fixed it.

Try the free version first, and later you will want the paid version.

We use Pandora FMS to monitor both on-premise and Cloud infrastructure, and some KPIs of our application. The SLA reports are simply extraordinary, it's very simple and easy to generate them and see whether the solution is behaving as expected or not.

Thanks to Pandora FMS, we've been able to adapt to every new monitoring challenge over the past seven years. That's a LOT of time in the industry.

Moreover, its powerful alarm and event systems turned our previous solutions to dust, by being able to escalate incidents easily with a matter of clicks.

We use the alert system a lot, with several actions per configured alert. These include actions like sending a Pushover notification, email, or even start a new EC2 instance.

The good thing about this system is the flexibility that provides. There's really no new technology that Pandora can't integrate with.

The SLA reports are just outstanding. It provides a clear vision about the KPIs and its evolution in time.

The official forum is active enough to answer most of the high-end technical questions that you may have. Besides, the documentation is really extensive and provides a lot of examples.

Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios.

The last two years have been great. They've changed their software release policy for better and improved the overall stability.

I've seen Pandora FMS setups monitoring five thousand unique endpoints without any kind of optimization. That is crazy!

So far we've been able to communicate with the company, and the community through their forums, and we love the support. They do care about good ideas to improve the product, and they are good at providing support to answer most of the questions.

We used Zabbix in the past and deprecated it because its interface lacks usability. The reporting & alerting capabilities were just inferior.

This initial setup is not particularly complex, although I took the official training & certifications, which helped a lot.

We performed the implementation in-house.

We use the Open Source edition, but I've worked with the Enterprise edition in the past. 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.

We evaluated Nagios, New Relic, Datadog, and AWS Cloudwatch. All of them were great in certain topics (more than Pandora FMS), but they weren't as good in the general sense, and comparably inflexible. We needed a swiss-army-knife solution for the next ten years, and we made the right choice.

We utilize Pandora FMS to accurately maintain an up to the minute, easy to digest visual on inventory and security throughout our network for certain industry compliance of workstations and servers. We are a multi-OS environment and Pandora FMS fits nicely as it supports all of our Operating Systems with provided modules.

This solution has allowed our IT staff to visualize and pinpoint key security vulnerabilities in our business network workstations and servers. This has provided an opportunity for our IT Department to apply corrective measures. Network monitoring is fun again with Pandora FMS.

Easy installation of the Windows-based agent has made reporting foolproof. This solution has screens that are easy to understand and provide a wealth of information. Inventory tracking and auditing have become much easier to visualize. Ability to integrate with other software is very helpful, as well.

Better support for custom themes would be greatly appreciated. I would like to have a dashboard with all assets displayed, with a quick hover-over status. Think "at-a-glance" style view of all assets on one page. This would make it easy for data center admins to get an overall picture.