Pandora FMS is now available as an Amazon AMI (installed on CentOS Linux) in a way that’s completely compatible and optimized to work on your Amazon Web Services virtual enviroments. Since Amazon Web Services is a worldwide reference when it comes to cloud services, we decided to prove Pandora FMS’ flexibility, and that’s why we’ve created a free image file so you can fully monitor your AWS.
And, how can you benefit from this? If you’re currently using AWS infrastructure services such as EC2, RDS, VPC, etc., you’ll know the benefits it brings first hand.
With Pandora FMS you’ll be able to add a layer of monitoring, adapted exactly to your needs, where you’ll be able to obtain: email notifications for issues such as CPU usage peaks, low memory, unstable filesystems and, even for those with more expertise, you can create an action to integrate with the Amazon API in order to self-provision your infrastructure based on certain events.
Sounds good, right?
Ever since Amazon Web Services released publicly, it has grown to enormous proportions, rapidly becoming one of the more successful all-in-one cloud services, with everything from cloud services to virtual machine creation, all accompanied by a truckload of software applications, operating systems and general integrations.
When it comes to operating systems and integrations, Amazon uses what they’ve called ‘Amazon Machine Images’ (or AMIs) which are operating systems with pre-installed applications and tools. This is exactly what we’ve done with Pandora FMS. We’ve created an AMI which has CentOS as an OS base with Pandora installed within it.
Obviously, this is the OpenSource version of Pandora FMS for those who want to try it out on their AWS virtual environments.
Considering the amount of integrated tools available right now on Amazon Web Services (AWS), we can bravely state that Pandora FMS is a great addition in order to completely monitor your AWS, mainly because of preexisting integration with many tools that are also available on AWS as of recent times.
We must add that apart from being able to monitor any instance created on EC2, we can also install software agents in order to monitor any device that has visibility with Pandora FMS’ virtual machine by sending information through the Tentacle protocol. This means you can monitor any element of your AWS infrastructure and send the information to the Pandora FMS console to alerto m the infrastructure’s status.
You’ll be able to find Pandora FMS’ AMI when you are required to select an AMI for your Amazon VM. You should look under “community AMIs” (where you’ll be able to find all types of OpenSource solutions apart from ours). Once there look for Pandora FMS, you’ll be taken to an unique search result which will be our CentOS AMI which comes with a default version 6.0 SP1 of Pandora FMS installed.
The difference right now between our AMI and most others is that, for now, we’re going to maintain it with the Open Source version, therefore creating a free to use AMI, unlike others which can actually be quite expensive regarding a feature-price ratio.
We’re sure that this monitoring tool for AWS will be quite useful and well received, mainly because of the growth that AWS is going through right now. We think that this service is very promising, including all of its parts we’ve mentioned in this article, and therefore hope to continue to grow alongside it and provide proper tools for those users who wish to add Pandora FMS to their Amazon environments.
Here we include some links so you can access Amazon’s AWS and AMI pages, as well as the instructions for those of you who are already AWS users and want to download Pandora FMS’ AMI: Amazon Web Services, Amazon Machine Images, and our own Installation guide for Pandora FMS’ AMI
We also made a video guide for this same process:
Benefits of AWS monitoring with the Pandora FMS’AMI
As a summary, below we ennumerate the main advantages of using our Pandora FMS image to monitor your AWS infrastructure.
- We install the Open (free) edition of Pandora FMS to begin monitoring.
- Add your monitoring to all the Amazon VMs you wish and access their status on the same dashboard.
- Integrate your AWS monitoring with your own CPD structures even if they’re not stored in the cloud.
- Scale your AWS monitoring by adding more components to your monitoring such as: Amazon databases, hard drives, cloud availability for applications, and many more options; all thanks to Pandora FMS’ flexibility.
Please be sure to drop a comment if you have something to say, and don’t hesitate to constructively criticise, or ask any questions you deem necessary.
Pandora FMS’s editorial team is made up of a group of writers and IT professionals with one thing in common: their passion for computer system monitoring. Pandora FMS’s editorial team is made up of a group of writers and IT professionals with one thing in common: their passion for computer system monitoring.
