Some thoughts on Pandora FMS

[Sancho]

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Hello,

I am studying economics and computer sience and doing my diploma exam right now. My task is to find an suitable open source network monitoring software for the computer center of my university.
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Thanks

Wow, this is a quite (large) interesting thoughts. I think I need to take a time to properly answer you, give me a few hours.

See you.

[raul]

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Joez,
thanks for your contribution to this forum. We know that we have a lot of things to improve, but this project is still growing and if you want to contribute, you can.

It’s very interesting some ideas you wrote about how to focus the documentation on. If you have time, I hope you would contribute and help the Pandora FMS community.

Many of the people that contributed to the project has transtaled from english doc to other languages, not just help to improve the english doc, it’s a pity. As non-native english speakers we make mistakes 😀

Thanks again

Raúl

[manu]

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Hello,

I am studying economics and computer sience and doing my diploma exam right now. My task is to find an suitable open source network monitoring software for the computer center of my university.

Well Pandoda FMS is one of the software alternatives I have looked over and I thought some of you might be interested in my thoughts…

We really appreciate all the feedback, and fist off, thanks for this post.

When starting my work I began to search around for open source monitoring tools and stumbled over the name “nagios” and “zenoss”. Those might be the biggest competitors for PFMS imho.

After searching the web and wikipedia for some time I somewhere read that Pandora FMS was used by the biggest electricity company in spain to monitor their systems.. I cannot find this information on the official Pandora Homepage, but if it is true I would definately put that on your website.. might be a good promotion.

Maybe you’re right, but we’ve been always trying to keep splitted the opensource project, the tool by itself, from the costumers pandora is running at. Perhaps, it’s time to re-think things again, for sure we’ll keep this in mind.

Another fact that made PFMS interesting were the neat looking screenshots of the graphical interface… Nagios seems to be a widely known and well-supported monitoring tool but I not at all like its simple-looking web interface and the fact that you cannot configure it through it, except using some plugins (nagios ql)… I think the screenshots are the main reason for people to try Pandora… Especially the screenshots showing a foto of a switch with direct link to the port usage and the one showing a complete network with color-coded status of the nodes…

Pandora Website looks professional as well (not as professional as Zenoss’ Website tho). You should put more links to sites actually using Pandora. Zenoss also have some neat looking product demonstration videos…

You hit the nail on the head. Pandora is, by far, more attractive than nagios, the problem here is that Nagios has been in the edge for loads of years, and that’s a fact that matters.
We have been thinking about making demostration videos of Pandora for months, but we don’t find time to do it, it’s a fact of time and resources, that’s all. We’ll do it, for sure we’ll.

So I installed the Pandora FMS following the installation guide and it was a real PITA. Package dependencies suck. Why not provide everything needed in a tarball and have a shell-skript do all the work like with “Zenoss”. When installing the console the installation wizard told me some “GD libraries” were missing, although I have them installed. No hint what to do in the wizard or the help…

What can I say? You’re absolutely right regarding to the dependencies issue. Since pandora uses lot of perl stuff, we need it, one way or another.
Why not providing a tarball with everything in it, I guess that’s not the standard way to do things. Think about how rpm or deb manages all the dependences stuff, would be easier to give a big big rpm with all the dependencies included, but it ain’t possible.
We do have a shell script for the agents and the server, but you have to install dependencies manually, as you noticed.
We’re planning to include Pandora FMS in Ubuntu, if that happens, will be awesome to do apt-get install pandorafms.

The whole installation procedere seems a bit mixed up. Someone should work it all over and make it step by step. For example putting database creation in the console installation manual does not make sense for a newbie who doesnt know web wizard will create database… Again, why not have a nice install script do the work?

True again about the database. I find it quite out-of-place.
When there wasn’t a wizard to install the webconsole the process was even worse, since you had to create the database manually doing cat ….sql | mysql -u… so, in that field, we’ve done some improvements.

Documantation in general seems to be an issue: The PFMS Manual is not really explaining anything, just throwing thoughts. The Basic Setup Section is more counting features than really explaining how to configure the system. English language in the documentation is partly so bad I dont even now what the writer means. You really need a better documentation…

Yep, we do have to work hard in this picture and take a deep look to how the documentation cause there’re lot of things to delete and loads of thing to add.

Well because the manual wasnt a big help I thought, hey it is open source, the community will help me. Okay I checked the forum (actually this forum) and it was quite shocking. The total post count is unbelievable low when you subtract news announces and other posts. Actual discussions or help topics about PFMS are like 100 in total. And there is no other official forum, right?

Unfortunately, not so many people is like you. Most of them just take a look at the forum, post their things and dissapear. I tell you this too, about a year ago the community was even smaller, we’re growing step by step

So after all I will not recommend Pandora FMS to my computer center, just because of the fact that it is badly documented and I feel like if you have a problem in the future, nobody will be there to help you and you are pretty much on your own… only a few people (according to post count in this forum) are using Pandora FMS yet and community seems to be rather small, although the product seems good.

From my point of view, everyone who posted their problems here had a great help coming directly from the developers of pandorafms, the core team look everyday at this forum and if there’s a new post, we always try to help. So you’d not be at your own.

From what I understand the makers of PFMS run their own company and are actually making money from people who dont know how to configure PFMS on their own. This combined with the very bad documentation is not a very good starting-poing there imho. Zenoss seems to have the same business plan (keep software free, make money by providing service), but they actually have a very detailed 200 pages pdf manual on their website explaining every component of the system in detail.

Actually that’s not true. What is being sold is not pandora installation, but pandora services, to adapt the product to whatever the scenario is with development…

Nagios on the other hand is backed up by a really big community and chances are very good if you have a problem someone on the net will help you. It seems to be a very powerful tool with lots of plugins, too. However nagios’ web interface looks poor…

Nagios has been on the road for at least 5 more years than pandora, that’s important.

I truly want to thank you this post, hope to see you around again
Manuel.