It was my first Google Summer of Code as mentor, and I must say, GSOC is an incredible opportunity devised by Google . All the students who join this program are willing to learn and help you with your projects as much as they can. The “opensorce philosophy”creates a very nice atmosphere that encourages people to share knowledge: everyone is ready to teach people useful things that they know and learn new things that they don’t know. It’s a constant information exchange that enriches our lives a lot.
My project involved starting a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox from scratch to see in realtime all the events generated by Pandora FMS, an all-purpose monitoring system which is our main project. Events were seed by our server, by using a WEB API (Rest).
We had two months to teach people how to use Pandora FMS. Our students didn’t know anything about monitoring systems nor our software. As they were all studying IT engineering, we didn’t have technical problems but conceptual ones. They had to get used to words like “event”, “gruops”, “ACL’s agents” and “hash validation”. They worked hard and learnt how to use all these terms very quickly what made our work easier.
However, personally, I think the best part of the program was to work with people from different cultures and backgrounds. We all had to adapt ourselves to each other and this is a very interesting game where everyone learns and improves their teamwork skills.
From a practical point of view, after finishing GSOC, we had a full functional extension for Chrome and Firefox. In my opinion, Chrome offers a better solution for this kind of technology than Firefox and the final result for Pandora FMS extension is very nice. Firefox extension is also good, but Chrome is just cool 🙂
Some screenshots of the final project.
Chrome extension screenshots
Mozilla Firefox add-on screenshots
Extension download
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pandora-fms-event-viewer-fo/
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.
