Pandora FMS Reviews

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.

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 FMS.
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.

six 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.

I use this solution for the testing of possible network monitoring scenarios. I have tried the solution but I am still in the testing phase, reading the documentation and training.

I have it installed in virtual machines and I simulate possible scenarios. In any organization, it is very important to have a notion of what happens in the network. This includes the monitoring of services, applications, and nodes.

The most valuable features in this solution are:

• Large Hispanic community
• Self-detection system for host or terminals
• System of alarms or notifications
• SLA reporting and management system
• Geolocation
• Monitoring of virtual environments
• Agents for different platforms
• Administration by CLI
• Intuitive interface

I find that this software is resource heavy, and demands a lot of processing capacity.  I would like to see it lightened. The somewhat long configuration means that the start of implementation may be slow.

Nice features to see would be:

• The possibility to make it work without agents.
• It would be good if it had a long history of occurrences.
• Notifications via hangouts or google chat.

According to what I have seen, this solution is stable, but I have still tried it in small scenarios so I cannot give an opinion about large environments.

I notice that it is quite scalable.

I've only talked to the community.

I have used OpenNMS and Zabbix. I switched to Pandora because it is more intuitive and there is more documentation in Spanish.

The initial configuration was simple, without anything special.

The deployment was handled internally.

I work in support and I handle several projects of telephony and VoIP. In this capacity, I need to have insight into my network environments.

It is a personal issue, everyone has different needs.

In choosing this solution I evaluated prices, platforms, the alert management system, alarm system, and reports.

I like this solution a lot because it has a very large Hispanic community and the platform looks very friendly. Given the need for organizations to monitor their networks, I find Pandora to be very useful.

Overall, I really like the solution and I will continue training. My advice is to make more documentation available in Spanish.

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 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.

We use this solution for monitoring our infrastructure, our clients' infrastructure, and applications.

It provides alerting and reporting about our network and infrastructure, as well as customers' services. It also provides our customers with management reports.

It provides us with proactive monitoring and is very easy to configure and maintain.

The most valuable features are centralized policy management and the remote management of agents. These make maintenance a lot easier and less costly in terms of time, compared to other solutions that we have used in the past. 

I think some improvements to the Android app would be good.

The support from Pandora FMS is legendary. They respond very quickly. They are open to improvement and implement these suggestions very quickly.