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Federative Republic of Brazil

Data Pandora
Data Pandora

Acre is located in the northwest of the country, and is one of the 26 states that together with the Federal District form the Federative Republic of Brazil. The Information Systems Department that chose Pandora FMS, depends on the Directorate of Information and Communication Technology of the Government of the State of Acre, Brazil.

STARTING POINT

We have a great project called “Floresta Digital”. The objective of the project is to bring free Internet to all the citizens of our state. We have 22 municipalities and 700,000 inhabitants, and we are working to provide free Internet access to 16 of these municipalities.

In the government, we work with OpenSource tools, based on Linux and we were looking for a management and control system for large environments, since we need to control all our equipment throughout the state, including: servers, routers, switch’s, directional and omni-directional radios.

PROJECT’S CHALLENGE

For a long time, we tried numerous tools: Nagios, Zabbix, Zenoss, and none of them could meet our needs. It was then that we discovered that Pandora FMS was exactly what we needed.

At the moment we have registered approximately 350 devices connected to each other via VPN and there is still a fleet of systems to be installed. We estimate to have a total of about 800 devices in the next few months.

“It was the best result out of the many systems we evaluated along with Pandora FMS. We have been following Pandora since version 3.2.1 and its evolution is getting better and better.”

Luciano Zeni. Coordinator of the Information Systems Department. Directorate of Information and Communication Technology of the Government of the State of Acre, Brazil.

WHY PANDORA FMS?

The question was “who will win the fight Zabbix, Zenoss or Pandora FMS?” The article featured the tools we had previously tested: Zenoss and Zabbix. Pandora FMS was new to our team, and that’s when we wondered why not give it a try.

We quickly found the website, and set up the site in a Pandora FMS virtual machine. It was then that we discovered that Pandora FMS was the perfect solution for our project.

antenas

We installed Pandora FMS on a virtual machine with Debian Linux and two network interfaces, one internal and one external, and named our DNS (pandorafms.ac.gov.br / pandora_console). We used a Google API key to be able to use GIS mapping systems.

Pandora FMS is the perfect combination of conventional map visualization (Network Map) with GIS maps (GIS Maps), this helped us to understand our wireless mesh network and monitor all our equipment more efficiently.

Now we understand better how our infrastructure is distributed through GIS maps, and we can intervene quickly when any of them have problems. It is very useful to analyze the data obtained through SNMP, to evaluate performance and capacity problems.

The alert system is excellent, it warns us about any problems occurring with the equipment, especially when any Internet link is not available in any city, or when there are problems in bandwidth consumption in any of the key points, and so on.

Another important feature is the SSH gateway that allows us to access through SSH or Telnet directly to the monitoring Web page, an excellent idea, since we can access external devices that are connected by VPN.

“Pandora FMS helped us understand that a monitoring system must be simple and yet effective.”

Luciano Zeni. Coordinator of the Information Systems Department. Directorate of Information and Communication Technology of the Government of the State of Acre, Brazil.

PANDORA FMS BENEFITS

Monitoring the events of such a large network is the basis of any professional in the field of information technology.

It is the department’s policy to save costs, and this includes the travel of technicians to the different municipalities, thanks to Pandora, we know what we have to replace with precision. And most importantly, if we actually have to travel to the site, so we also save on fuel, living expenses and per diem for civil servants.

In a nutshell:

check Easy to intervene in cases of equipment failure.

check Easy to understand network distribution and growth.

check Excellent integration with GIS maps.

check Simplicity of equipment registration.

check Easy configuration of modules.

check Excellent alerts system.

This project will be of great importance for the citizen, since it will allow us to solve problems before people have to complain about the failure of an Access Point. This will allow us to intervene with agility and speed.

The use of GIS maps helps us to decide and plan where to place our wireless radios to bring free Internet to the citizens.

antenas

With custom fields, we can put the contacts of the people who need to connect without having to unplug the location, even someone who is not from the technical staff can easily make the intervention, as an example, a professional administrative area.

“Monitoring events in such a large network is the basis of any professional in the IT field.”

Luciano Zeni. Coordinator of the Information Systems Department. Directorate of Information and Communication Technology of the Government of the State of Acre, Brazil.

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