Item: Pandora FMS
Rating: 9
Author: Víctor Carrión Hontoria

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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 and Cons

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

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.

Return on Investment

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.

Alternatives Considered

Centreon, Opsview Monitor, Nagios Core and Icinga

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.

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Zimbra Email & Collaboration, Docker, Ubuntu

Likelihood to Recommend

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, an excellent monitoring tool

Overall Satisfaction with Pandora FMS