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Pandora FMS vs ServiceNow Discovery comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 6, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Pandora FMS
Ranking in Server Monitoring
17th
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (47th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (38th), Log Management (42nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (30th)
ServiceNow Discovery
Ranking in Server Monitoring
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (5th), Cloud Resource Discovery Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Server Monitoring category, the mindshare of Pandora FMS is 1.7%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Discovery is 9.1%, up from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Gabriel Glusgold - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 9, 2023
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…
RISHI GUPTA - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 20, 2023
Valuable relationship building that discovers and auto-builds to make cleanup easy
Proof of concept for the solution doesn't make much sense. It totally depends on the capability of your partner. Choose the partner very carefully while you plan to use the solution. If you get a very competent and capable partner, then life will be easy. If you have a partner who only does technical implementations, then that won't help you. You need to have CMDB and CSDM experts on the team because the solution is for CMDB and CSDM. If you don't design your data model really well, then the solution will not give you much result. The solution is not fully automated so you still need to make some effort. You have to go through the complete remodeling cycle for non-useful data elimination whenever you add a new LAN segment or new mid-server on a new data center or service. It is a little bit of effort, but it is worth the effort. Based on the necessary but important effort, the solution is rated a seven out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Thanks to its flexibility, I have been able to adapt the tool to our servers and find out quickly how their console works."
"This solution has screens that are easy to understand and provide a wealth of information."
"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."
"You can configure several types of architecture for high availability or load balancing."
"The monitoring system within this solution is very good. It is easy to use and navigate, and makes issue alarms easily viewable."
"The most valuable feature is that it is an all-in-one monitoring system."
"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."
"The product provides great scalability features."
"ServiceNow Discovery is useful for discovering the servers, like the servers of Windows and Linux, from the client network."
"The most valuable feature of ServiceNow Discovery is its performance."
"The best thing about Discovery is maintaining all the CIs in one place. I can sort the data, export it to Excel for manipulation, and build reports like how many computers or servers we have and their capacity."
"I believe one of the great functionalities or improvements in ServiceNow Discovery is its ability to gather information about any Configuration Items (CIs)."
"It has been stable since deployment."
"It's a single system of record and it captures the relationships."
"The product's discovery feature is valuable due to its accuracy, reliability, and the high prestige associated with the information it provides."
 

Cons

"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
"The price for Pandora FMS is expensive."
"Third-party integration should be improved for some commonly used products."
"It would be helpful to include the generation of reports for times that the network was out of service."
"We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution."
"It would be useful if Pandora FMS included an ISO image (or «software appliance») for each big company that leases virtual private machines (VPS), just like in AWS."
"When it comes to the definition of local Software Agents for the first time in the open-source version, it can become very tedious."
"We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of."
"On the Software Asset Management part of it, I expect additional reconciliation and Discovery features there."
"The manual pattern-matching process is not only time-consuming but also presents challenges during system upgrades, demanding revisits to ensure compatibility."
"ServiceNow has a constant development environment. Hence they get constant bugs which result in incorrect performance. It should also improve customer service."
"The solution needs to improve the cost of the solution. There are a few different solutions and they do act the same and have the same types of capabilities, however, the cost is quite high."
"It is one of the most costly applications in terms of subscription costs."
"Technical support has not been helpful when we have come across problems."
"Improvements are required with the scripts used to collect the information from servers."
"ServiceNow Discovery could improve the interface. The navigation bar could improve. It would be helpful to have a landing page to go to find all the elements in one place."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"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."
"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."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"The pricing is determined based on the CIs."
"This is expensive, but it meets our needs."
"ServiceNow Discovery's licensing is not a very small investment, but it definitely pays off."
"ServiceNow Discovery is expensive, but the company has a monopoly and we need to use the solution. We use it because we do not have a choice."
"It's on a yearly basis. We renew our contract for three years at a time."
"If the product is not deployed properly, it can be very expensive."
"This solution is a paid option within the ServiceNow framework."
"It costs a lot. It is probably close to over a hundred thousand. It's an expensive platform, but you can't compare ServiceNow's Discovery functionality to other discovery tools. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison of ServiceNow to a configuration management tool to an asset management tool because it does those things, but it's not those things."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Educational Organization
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pandora FMS?
Features I have found most valuable with Pandora are the personalized metrics and the simplicity of data.
What needs improvement with Pandora FMS?
I would like for the solution to be faster and have a better tolerance between parallel servers for Pandora and Pest Control. In the next release, I'd like to see, when it comes to monitoring, the ...
What is your primary use case for Pandora FMS?
My primary use case for Pandora is monitoring.
What do you like most about ServiceNow Discovery?
The solution can prioritize the discovery of IP ranges. The product automatically places all Discovery CIs into the correct class within the CMDB.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Discovery?
The product pricing is fair and reasonable for the value it provides. However, it is important to factor in the ongoing maintenance costs, as the system requires professional upkeep to ensure optim...
What needs improvement with ServiceNow Discovery?
The continuous improvement in the quality and customization of the product features would be beneficial, particularly as more customers rely heavily on its capabilities.
 

Comparisons

 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
York, National Grid, DXC Technology, experian, BEACHBODY
Find out what your peers are saying about Pandora FMS vs. ServiceNow Discovery and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
815,854 professionals have used our research since 2012.