Pandora FMS is a very flexible and versatile tool. That is why it can work with remote monitoring, local agent-based monitoring and a combination of both. Pandora FMS has been developed in several languages: C++, Perl and VBS in the agents, Perl in the server and PHP5/Javascript in the Web Console. Pandora FMS has a modular design, based on several specific servers for each kind of checking. All its components are redundant.  It also can work on HA Active/Active mode.

Pandora FMS has been designed to work on enterprise environments with a set of systems that can grow unbounded. Our engineers estimate an average of 2500 agents per server with 25 modules each, running 5 minute interval checks.

The Enterprise version has specific features such as the export server or the metacosole that improve these numbers by increasing  the number of servers or assigning more agents per server. As remarkable examples of its versatility, we should mention the following two cases: one of our clients has 6000 agents, a four server setup and a metaconsole and another one has a single setup with one server and 160000 modules. 

Export server

The export server scales certain data from an installation (or site) to other locations in Pandora FMS. The data is received from the server as "copies". The sending server can mark, module by module, all data that we want to export.

Metaconsole

The Metaconsole implements a way to distribute the monitoring between different servers that are physically independent. Every server has its own database, console and server. Besides, it also has its own agents, alerts, reports, users, groups and policies.

The Metaconsole does not process information. It only "reads" the information from its original source: Pandora's server.  The meta console works first, by searching an agent in all Pandoras and then, automatically linking the local data views of each Pandora to show them in each agent. Since version 2.1, Pandora FMS implements delegated authentication (through hash) which makes it possible. It means that a user previously authenticated in the meta console does not have to authenticate again in any of the  Pandoras  asociated to the metaconsole.

This is the reason why there is not a theoretical limit of systems to monitor. We can add as many servers, in a linear way, as we want to get a certain scalability. If we suppose that every server processes 1200 agents, we can easily go beyond 6000 agents by adding 5 servers. 

Tentacle proxy (Drone agents)

The new Tentacle version supports proxy usage (HTTP/Connect mode). Agents contact the server directly by an intermediate standard proxy. You also can use the new Tentacle Proxy Server to centralize all communication between Pandora FMS and the agents, allowing the file management and remote configuration for policy based-monitoring.