Pandora FMS – Opensource Enterprise Monitoring System

Pandora  Flexible Monitoring System – Pandora FMS is designed to adapt to every role and to every organization. Its main aim is to be flexible enough to manage and control the complete infrastructure, without further need to invest more time or money into another monitoring tool.  FMS is not just for next generation monitoring system. It supports legacy operating systems, Network devices without additional configuration. Pandora FMS uses  SNMP v1 ,v2,v3 or via TCP protocol probes (snmp, ftp, dns, http, https, etc), ICMP or UDP  for monitoring.

 

Pandora FMS Features

• Autodiscovery. On a local network, Pandora’s plug-in agents permit hard disk, partition, and database detection in the Pandora server, among many other features by default.

• Autoexploration. By using the web-based interface of Pandora FMS, we can detect active systems, and catalogue them according to the target’s operating system. By applying a profile, Pandora is able to commence monitoring the discovered targets. It can even detect the topology of the network and create a web-based map based on route distribution.

• Monitoring. The Agents of Pandora FMS are the most powerful in the market. They are capable of obtaining information – from the execution of a command to the call, at its most basic level- on the Windows API: Events, logs, numerical data, process stages, memory and CPU consumption. Pandora avails of a default monitors’ library, but one of the greatest advantages of Pandora is the ability to quickly add, edit and create new monitors.

• Remote access. The agents themselves can activate services, delete temporary files or execute processes. Commands can also be executed remotely from the console, like stopping or starting services. Furthermore, it’s possible to program tasks that require periodical execution. It’s also possible to use Pandora FMS as the launch-point to access Windows machines remotely (via VNC), to access web or Unix systems through Telnet, or SSH from the Pandora web interface.

• Alerts and Notifications. Notification are just as important as failure detection. Pandora FMS gives you an almost infinite variety of notification methods and formats. This includes, but is not limited to escalation, correlation of alerts and prevention and mitigation of cascading events.

• Analysis and Visualization. Monitoring is not just receiving a trap or visualizing a failing service. Within the Pandora environment, monitoring is also a method to present forecast reports, correlated summary charts of long term gathered data, and to generate user portals, delegate reports to third parties or to define its own charts and tables. Pandora incorporates all of these tools within a Web interface.

• Inventory Creation. Contrary to other solutions where the idea of CMDB is just an afterthought, to Pandora it is an active option. The inventory is flexible and dynamic (it can auto-discover, accepts remote input, etc.) It can notify observers of changes (e.g. uninstalled software) or simply be used to make listings.

 

The Pandora FMS Architecture

Pandora FMS is modular and decentralized. The most important component is the database, where everything is stored. Pandora FMS supports MySQL , PostgreSQL and Oracle databases.  Each component of Pandora FMS can be replicated and works in a pure HA environment, be it passive, active or in a clustered environment (Active/Active with load balancing). There are also descriptions for methods to setup a high availability SQL backend.

 

 

Under Pandora FMS, there are twelve different servers in total, specialized in and responsible for the various tasks necessary to make Pandora what it is today.

• Data Server
• Network Server
• SNMP Server
• WMI Server
• Recon Server
• Plugin Server
• Prediction Server
• web server
• Export Server
• Inventory Server
• Event Correlation Server
• Enterprise Network Server for SNMP and ICMP
• Satellite server

 

Network Server Architecture: 

 

Pandora FMS Software Client Agent:

A software agent installed on a remote node is completely different from the one on the Pandora server or within Pandora’s network console. The software agent gathers information local to the node from the engine where it’s executed, gathering information on the node by commands.

 

Pandora FMS also support HA in Active/Passive mode and Clustered Active/Active mode.

 

In the upcoming articles, we will see that how to deploy Pandora FMS server and how to add the clients to it. For more information, please visit https://pandorafms.com.