1. Introduction

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

The purposeaim is not to maketake 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 features, but to talk about the most relevant ones, in order to start working and managing it in record time. 

Pandora FMS architecture is made upcomposed of different services: 

• DatabaseA DB server (Percona/MySQL).
• A Web console.Console.
• A Pandora FMS serverServer (which in turn runs different types of services).
• A small optional application (EndPoint)EndPoint) that runs on the servers where you wishwant to collect information from (both WindowsMS Windows® and Linux)Linux®) and sendsends 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 to any networkcomputer or device on the network that canis ready to be monitored. That is to say,is, everything youfrom maywhich we can obtain data from and that has an associated IP address, such as servers, routers, or switches.switches.

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

installation, for example, a 100-agent license.

The information collected in each agentof these agents is not relevant,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. A EndPoint is the piece of software that collects information, an agent is just how this information is displayed and managed. They only share names.modules.

Minimum hardware requirements

The requirements set outshown in this table are the minimum recommendedrecommendations for the differentvarious installations. These recommendations are calculated assuming that 80% of the modules have historydata data, thathistory, each agent has an average of about 10 modulesmodules, and that the average sampling is five minutes. These recommendations are specified for an environment where theythe database, PFMS Server, and Web Console are installed inon the same database server, server and console.:

Hardware	SMALL	MEDIUM	BIGLARGE
CPU	2 cores at 2 GHz	24 cores at 2,2.5 GHz	46 cores at 3 GHz
RAM	4 GB	8 GB	16 GB
HDStorage device	720015 rpmK RPM or SSD	15K15 K RPM oor SSD	SSD
Storage space	~20GB20 GB	~60GB60 GB	~120 GB
Capacity	Up to 5001,000 agentsmodules	Up to 200010,000 agentsmodules	5000Up agentsto 30,000 modules

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

• If you already have a Pandora FMS installation, let's go straightdirectly to device discovery here.here
• Everything discovered and configured? GoLet's move on to metric alerting here.here
• YouI need to start seeingvisualizing youmy data,data; getlet's startedstart with reports here.here