Pandora FMS, an excellent monitoring tool
Updated October 03, 2024

Pandora FMS, an excellent monitoring tool

Víctor Carrión Hontoria | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pandora FMS

Pandora FMS is the corporate monitoring system we've been using for years in our corporation. It allows us to obtain functional alerts and trend analysis for our entire IT infrastructure. Our main goals with Pandora FMS are to achieve a capable and reliable monitoring system, and a system that allows us to develop our capacity plan. Pandora FMS meets both objectives.

Pros

  • Alert management and dispatch
  • Generating charts and trends
  • Customization of dashboards
  • Integration with systems

Cons

  • The interface is not intuitive due to the number of options it has and its organization.
  • It has a free version with limitations, and another paid version. The commercial one has a quite high cost.
  • It has a certain learning curve.
  • Substantial improvement in monitoring service. Detecting alerts on time always results in economic savings.
  • Improvement in the periodic report associated with the capacity plan. The tool is indispensable in decision-making.
  • Centralization and tool savings. Pandora FMS's versatility allows centralizing several functions into a single tool.
The solution is very complete, and even includes extras such as IPAM.
Deployment can be a bit unintuitive at first, but once you become familiar with the solution and thanks to its automatic deployment options it ends up being easier than it seemed. The power and options of the solution are its greatest virtue.
We considered Pandora FMS to be the solution that offered more features at a lower cost. We were particularly interested in the abundance of options available in Pandora FMS's free version and the ability to monitor practically anything in an extremely heterogeneous environment like ours. We also considered Pandora FMS for its management capabilities and the possibilities offered by its web interface.

Do you think Pandora FMS delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Pandora FMS's feature set?

Yes

Did Pandora FMS live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Pandora FMS go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Pandora FMS again?

Yes

Zimbra Email & Collaboration, Docker, Ubuntu
I believe Pandora FMS is a solution that adapts to any type of scenario; it's useful for small businesses as well as large organizations. It more than meets the need to have a comprehensive monitoring system capable of sending alerts instantly and consulting historical data, logs, and trends. Additionally, for small businesses, the free version will be more than sufficient in most cases. And for those who do not want to deploy the service on-premise, there is an option for MaaS (Monitoring as a Service).

Pandora FMS Feature Ratings

Network Performance Monitoring
8.4
Automated network device discovery
8
Network monitoring
9
Baseline threshold calculation
8
Alerts
10
Network capacity planning
8
Packet capture analysis
8
Network mapping
8
Customizable reports
8
Wireless infrastructure monitoring
8
Hardware health monitoring
9

Using Pandora FMS

4 - IT Staff
1 - Sysadmin
  • Monitoring critical equipment
  • Managing health alerts
  • Preventing problems
  • Telegram alerts
  • IPam

Evaluating Pandora FMS and Competitors

  • Other
At the time, there were two decisive factors for choosing Pandora FMS: on the one hand, the power and possibilities of the solution, and on the other, the capabilities of the free community edition.
Broadly speaking, the solution was correct, and Pandora has turned out to be a success.

Pandora FMS Implementation

  • Implemented in-house
Change management was minimal - The implementation is not simple, but neither is it excessively complicated for a person accustomed to sysadmin work.

Pandora FMS Support

The commercial support with Pandora FMS has been correct, from the gathering of information to the receipt of quotes. Regarding the community version, the documentation resources available are correct.
ProsCons
None
None
We decided to stick with the free version as it met all of our functional requirements.

Using Pandora FMS

ProsCons
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Unnecessarily complex
Difficult to use
  • Automatic equipment detection
  • Alert display
  • Status and historical graphs
  • General interface
  • Manual equipment management
  • Understanding the usage methodology
Yes, but I don't use it

Comments

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