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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
9th
Ranking in Log Management
14th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (6th), Container Monitoring (4th)
Pandora FMS
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
55th
Ranking in Log Management
63rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
45th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (78th), Server Monitoring (25th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 2.0%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Observability2.0%
Pandora FMS0.7%
Other97.3%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

MA
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

"The solution allows us to dig deep into data."
"Its diverse set of features available on the cloud is of significant importance."
"The most valued feature of Elastic is its log analytics capabilities."
"It is a powerful tool that allows users to collect and transform logs as needed, enabling flexible visualization and analysis."
"Elastic provides built-in features for queries and report generation. It's a very good tool for monitoring integration capabilities."
"The solution has been stable in our usage."
"I have built a mini business intelligence system based on Elastic Observability."
"The solution is open-source and helps with back-end logging. It is also easy to handle."
"The network monitoring and configuration within this solution is very good."
"It provides us with proactive monitoring and is very easy to configure and maintain."
"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."
"Pandora FMS provides us with a general report (graphical) about all of the connected devices, which helps with planning new stations and tracking them."
"Thanks to this software and to the work of the support team, we have everything under control."
"We are able to control our business with this all-in-one monitoring tool."
"This product has allowed us to identify and correct certain issues that were affecting our solution."
"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."
 

Cons

"The only challenging aspect for new users is often writing the query language."
"The interface could be improved."
"If we had some pre-defined templates for observability that we could start using right away after deploying it – instead of having to build or to change some of the dashboards – that would be helpful."
"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."
"The price is the only issue in the solution. It can be made better and cheaper."
"More web features could be added to the product."
"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."
"It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like network observability, package flow analysis, and device performance data on the infrastructure side."
"I find that this software is resource heavy, and demands a lot of processing capacity."
"Improvements are needed for server and network discovery, including service-based discovery."
"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
"When it comes to the definition of local Software Agents for the first time in the open-source version, it can become very tedious."
"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."
"An update to the Android app would be appreciated."
"It would be helpful to include the generation of reports for times that the network was out of service."
"I would like for the solution to be faster and have a better tolerance between parallel servers for Pandora and Pest Control."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Elastic Observability's pricing could be better for small-scale users."
"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."
"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."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"Users have to pay for some features, like the alerts on different channels, because they are unavailable in different source versions."
"Since we are a huge company, Elastic Observability is an affordable solution for us."
"The product is not that cheap."
"One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"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."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Government
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
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: December 2025.
879,425 professionals have used our research since 2012.