Pandora FMS

Comentarios: Started with the virtual appliance which made testing the product easy for evaluation. Once the decision was made it was decided to build as per the easy to follow instructions on the website for a CentOS distribution. It has been a solid experience backed with support by Pandora FMS team and the community. Customization was simple with the module library.

Puntos a favor: Pandora FMS allows our company to accurately maintain an up to the minute easy to digest visual on inventory and security through out 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 our Operating Systems with provided modules.

Contras: Better support for custom themes would be greatly appreciated. Ability to have a dashboard with all assets displayed with quick hover over status. Think at-a-glance style view of all assets on one page. Would make it easy for Data center admins to get an overall picture.

Comentarios: I've spent a lot of time working with and discussing our needs for monitoring, functionality and reporting with support and development, we've always been able to add to the software functionality to meet our needs whilst keeping the functionality useful to all. Support and Development have been very keen to discuss needs.

Puntos a favor: As our business grew, we took on a number of products to allow us to monitor, report and alert on the devices we supply and manage. over time we have outgrown each. when we looked at PandoraFMS we were impressed that we could deploy many servers in layers with a common central dashboard, making management easy. We also recognised that 'out of the box' monitoring didn't always meet our needs, in a lot of cases systems monitor many things that are irrelevant to us which ties up resource and storage to collect and keep this data that never gets looked at. PandoraFMS allows us to select the items we want to monitor and keep the data focused to our needs.

Contras: Deployment was very manual, however once we'd gone through setting this up for our needs using plugin server, it allows us to keep adding more and more monitored devices, each the same as the last.

Comentarios: The general feeling that Pandora FMS transmits is of robustness, at no time do you have the feeling that something is missing or that some module can do something else. It is a highly flexible and multiplatform solution that offers the possibility of monitoring a wide type of systems. If for any reason the element you need to monitor does not have a predefined module or plugin in Pandora you can always create a custom and specific script for what you need and through the “DataServer” process the responses to generate alerts and notifications without losing any of the functionalities that the web console offers. Additionally, the incorporation of Tentacle as transfer protocol simplifies the deployment process, while ensuring a transparent, fast and secure transfer of the information generated from and to the “Software Agents”. On the other hand, by implementing the solution from ISO based on Centos we will have preconfigured Cron Jobs that will be in charge of keeping our database in optimal conditions, ensuring the maximum performance of the solution. That for me is a great plus because it is not usual and if your knowledge in database management is not the most remarkable you don’t have to worry about this task. Being a solution running on Linux gives us an excellent relationship between hardware requirements and the number of agents that can be managed effectively, which can be up to 2000 agents using only 4GB of RAM, which today is a fairly modest amount.

Puntos a favor: User Experience: The interface is clean and friendly, also the separation between regular users and administrators is well defined without giving the sensation of missing tools or features. On the contrary, there is always some additional tool.

Contras: The definition of local Software Agents in the OpenSource version can become tedious during the initial deployment in multiple Agents. However, the Enterprise version covers this detail, allowing centralized administration and deployment from the web console.

Comentarios: The best thing about working with pandora FMS is the amazing support. if there ever is a game breaking bug introduced. or a feature not working as expected the support team is able to make a hot-fix within hours of filing the bug. Most of the time the fix is pushed within 2 hours.

Puntos a favor: in comparison with most monitoring software the software is incredibly easy to use. It does 95 % of what we want it to and the remainder is currently waiting on new features which have been added to the road map.

Contras: The software has a tendency to introduce tiny bugs each release. None of them are breaking in any way. but it feels like there is always 1 tiny thing which is not working as expected. most of them are fixed within 1 release which takes about 3 weeks.

Puntos a favor: Its flexibility to adapt to new technologies: we've found no application, server or cloud provider that couldn't be monitored.

Contras: It's not as out-of-the-box as they say. This solution requires proper training to get the 100% out of it.