Monitor a Windows Server with a Software Agent
At Pandora FMS there are two types of monitoring:
- Remote (carried out from Pandora FMS server to the different devices).
- Local (a software agent is installed in each of the machines to be monitored and this one is in charge of retrieving the information and sending it to Pandora FMS server.
See: “How to install a Windows Agent in Pandora FMS (video)”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_OvbrR-l_M&t=0s
At this point we will address the installation of a software agent in a MS Windows® computer and its basic monitoring.
Agent Installation
The first step is to download MS Windows® agent from:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pandora/files/Pandora%20FMS%207.0NG/759/Windows/
In this link you may choose between the 32 bit or 64 bit agent.
Once the agent is downloaded, run it by double clicking on it and the following language selection window will appear:
This is a standard MS Windows® installer that will prompt you to follow the steps. Accept the license and go through the different windows of the installer. Select the path where Pandora FMS agent will be installed (by default it is installed in %ProgramFiles%/pandora_agent). You may change it by clicking Browse..., once it is correctly specified click Next:
Wait for the files to be copied. Configure the IP address (or name) of Pandora FMS server that will receive the agent data and the group the agent will be associated to.
The following window shows the option to enable the remote configuration. It is important to have it enabled with 1 to have a copy of the agent in Pandora FMS server and from there to be able to add, edit and delete local modules directly from the agent.
To start the agent service at the end of the Pandora FMS agent installation, keep Run Pandora FMS Agent 7.0NG selected; otherwise you will have to do it manually, or it will start when MS Windows® restarts again.
Once the process is finished, MS Windows® agent is installed, running and reporting.
Checking the Information Returned by the Agent
Once MS Windows® agent has been started after installation, it is time to check what this agent is reporting. To do this, you must know the name under which this agent will report. By default the agent is created with the host name. You may see the MS Windows® host name by running the hostname command in a window with cmd.exe.
Once you know the agent name, the next step is to see if it was created in Pandora FMS. To do this you have several options. The first one is to search in the agent details, inside the group where the agent was created, in this example the Workstations group.
A faster and more efficient way to find the agent is to search directly through Pandora FMS search engine, indicating the agent's name.
By default, MS Windows® agent comes with several pre-loaded local basic monitoring modules, such as CPU load (CPU Load), % of RAM memory used (Memory_Used), free space in MB on disks (DiskUsed), and so on.
If you need to add new modules to this agent, you may check the advanced documentation of monitoring with software agents.
You may see graphs generated with the module data history and a table with the module data history from this view by clicking on the icons marked in the following screenshot: