Pandora FMS
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Pandora FMS Dashboard | |
| Original author(s) | Sancho Lerena |
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| Developer(s) | Ártica ST |
| Initial release | October 14, 2004 |
| Stable release | 5.1SP2 / February 24, 2015 |
| Development status | Active |
| Written in | Perl, PHP |
| Operating system | Linux |
| Available in | English, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, German, French, Arabic |
| Type | Network monitoring, System monitoring |
| License | GNU General Public License or proprietary EULA |
| Website | pandorafms.com |
Pandora FMS (for Pandora Flexible Monitoring System) is software for monitoring computer networks. Pandora FMS allows monitoring in a visual way the status and performance of several parameters from different operating systems, servers, applications and hardware systems such as firewalls, proxies, databases, web servers or routers.
Pandora FMS can be deployed in almost any operating system. It features remote monitoring (WMI, SNMP, TCP. UDP, ICMP, HTTP...) and it can also use agents. An agent is available for each platform. It can also monitor hardware systems with a TCP/IP stack, such as load balancers, routers, network switches, printers or firewalls.
Pandora FMS has several servers that process and get information from different sources, using WMI for gathering remote Windows information, a predictive server, a plug-in server which makes complex user-defined network tests, an advanced export server to replicate data between different sites of Pandora FMS, a network discovery server, and an SNMP Trap console.
Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Pandora FMS is free software.
Components
Pandora Server
In Pandora FMS architecture, servers are the core of the system because they are the recipients of bundles of information. They also generate monitoring alerts. It is possible to have different modular configurations for the servers: several servers for very big systems, or just a single server. Servers are also responsible for inserting the gathered data into Pandora's database. It is possible to have several Pandora Servers connected to a single Database. Different servers are used for different kind of monitoring: remote monitoring, WMI monitoring, SNMP and other network monitoring, inventory recollection, etc.
Servers are developed in Perl and work on any platform that has the required modules. Pandora was originally developed for Linux.
Web console
Pandora's user interface allows people to operate and manage the monitoring system. It is developed in PHP and depends on a database and a web server. It can work in a wide range of platforms: Linux, Solaris, Microsoft Windows, AIX and others. Several web consoles can be deployed in the same system if required.
Agents
Agents are daemons or services that can monitor any numeric parameter, boolean status, string or numerical incremental data and/or condition. They can be developed in any language (as Shellscript, WSH, Perl or C). They run on any type of platform (Microsoft, AIX, Solaris, Linux, IPSO, Mac OS or FreeBSD), also SAP, because the agents can communicate with the Pandora FMS Servers to send data in XML using SSH, FTP, NFS, Tentacle (protocol) or any data transfer means.
Database
The database module is the core module of Pandora. All the information of the system resides here. For example, all data gathered by agents, configuration defined by administrator, events, incidents, audit info, etc. are stored in the database.
At present, only MySQL database is supported, although support for others is planned to be added in the future.
Releases
| Version | Date | Information |
|---|---|---|
| 5.0 | October 17th, 2013 | New interface, new HTML5 interactive graphs, Netflow support, lots of improvements in monitoring (delayed monitoring, intensive monitoring, scheduled monitoring), better SLA reports, new visual service maps, log collection with agents, improvements on event management, and the new metaconsole for federated monitoring and autoprovisioning. |
| 4.1 | June 29th, 2013 | New mobile console, graph improvement, new ISO for rapid deployment & install, ICMP/SNMP monitoring improvement (on speed) and several GIS improvements. |
| 4.0.3 | January 19, 2013 | Graph display can now have two data sources displayed to allow comparison. Agent now supports Windows 8. Bugfixes and performance improvements. |
| 4.0.2 | June 27, 2012 | Some of the new features are: a gateway for SSH and Telnet, a new update system for the console, a new Tree View and new ready-to-use plugins for IPMI, DNS and UPD among others. Also, +250 bugs were fixed and several improvements were made, like an improved Visual Console editor, improved local and remote inventory including new modules and bug fixes, improved interfaces for Massive Operations, Policies and Synthetic Modules, performance enhancements for server plugins and much more. |
| 4.0 | September 26, 2011 | Support for Oracle and PostgreSQL, event correlation, report improvement, new features for agents (proxy and broker mode), new inventory with history, skin system. |
| 3.2.1 | February 23, 2011 | Usability improvement and minor an major bug fixing. |
| 3.2 | December 27, 2010 | Performance improved, smartphone web console, topology maps improved, policy manager improved, new file distribution for agents and new languages supported in reports. |
| 3.1 | June 1, 2010 | |
| 3.0 | December 29, 2009 | Flash interactive graphs, alert improvement and redesign, important improvements on windows agent, new SNMP trap console |
| 2.1 | March 3, 2009 | Multi server support, Tentacle server and client included in packages, usability and performance improvements |
| 2.0 | September 3, 2008 | New WMI, Plugin and Prediction Server. Better network auto discovery and topology detection, correlated alerts, log parser capable agents (win, Unix), planned downtimes, better reporting and more. |
| 1.3.1 | April 30, 2008 | New transfer protocol: Tentacle (protocol), new server options |
| 1.3 | October 12, 2007 | New logo, new recon server |
| 1.2 | December 5, 2006 | New logo, renamed as Pandora FMS, changed homepage |
| 1.1 | May 13, 2005 | New agents, console and documentation |
| 1.0 | October 14, 2004 | First stable release (known as pandoramon) |
Software appliances
Pandora FMS has a software appliance based on a customized CentOS Linux, installable on CD, comes ready to use (including a live CD) or ready to install to hard disk.
See also
- Comparison of network monitoring systems
- Data logging