1. Introduction

The purpose of this guide is to introduce Pandora FMS in a quick and concise way to someone who is not familiar with the tool. 

 The aim is not to take a tour through all the features of Pandora FMS, but rather to talk about those most relevant to being able to manage and operate in record time.  

 The architecture of Pandora FMS is composed of different services:  

 

 A DB server (Percona/MySQL). 

 A Web Console. 

 A Pandora FMS Server (which in turn runs different types of services). 

 A small optional application ( EndPoint ) that runs on the servers where you want to collect information (both MS Windows® and Linux®) and sends it to the central server. An EndPoint is the piece of software that collects information and an Agent is how that information is visualized and managed. 

 

 We call an agent any computer or device on the network that is ready to be monitored. That is, everything from which we can obtain data and has an associated IP address, such as servers, routers , or switches . 

 The number of these agents is what is used to license a Pandora FMS installation. 

 The information collected in each of these agents is irrelevant; it does not matter if it is a router with just a few simple metrics or a 48-port switch full of information. These metrics in Pandora FMS are known as modules . 

 Minimum hardware requirements 

 The requirements shown in this table are the minimum recommendations for the various installations. These recommendations are calculated assuming that 80% of the modules have data history, each agent has an average of 10 modules, and the average sampling is five minutes. These recommendations are specified for an environment where the database, PFMS Server, and Web Console are installed on the same server : 

 

 

 

 

 Hardware 

 SMALL 

 MEDIUM 

 LARGE 

 

 

 CPU 

 2 cores at 2 GHz 

 4 cores at 2.5 GHz 

 6 cores at 3 GHz 

 

 

 RAM 

 4 GB 

 8 GB 

 16 GB 

 

 

 Storage device 

 15 K RPM or SSD 

 15 K RPM or SSD 

 SSD 

 

 

 Storage space 

 ~20 GB 

 ~60 GB 

 ~120 GB 

 

 

 Capacity 

 Up to 1,000 modules  

 Up to 10,000 modules

 

 

 Up to 30,000 modules 

 

 

 

 

 

 In addition to the above recommendations, it is recommended to install MySQL on a separate server and install Percona XTraDB instead of standard MySQL. 

 

 If you already have a Pandora FMS installation, let's go directly to device discovery here 

 Everything discovered and configured? Let's move on to metric alerting here 

 I need to start visualizing my data; let's start with reports here