Monitoring a Windows server with a software agent
In Pandora FMS there are two types of monitoring:
- Remote (the one that is done from the Pandora FMS server to the different devices).
- Local (a software agent is installed in each of the machines to be monitored and it is in charge of extracting the information and sending it to the Pandora FMS server).
See also: "How to install a Pandora FMS Windows agent (video)": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVD9phgTuPI
In this point we are going to deal with the installation of a software agent in a MS Windows® machine and the basic monitoring of it.
Agent Installation
The first step is to download the MS Windows® agent from:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pandora/files/Pandora%20FMS%207.0NG/759/Windows/
At this link you can choose between 32-bit or 64-bit agent.
Once the agent is downloaded, run it by double-clicking on él and the language selection screen will appear:
It is a standard MS Windows® installer that will prompt you to follow the steps below. Accept the license and proceed through the different windows of the installer. Select the path where the Pandora FMS agent will be installed (by default it is installed in %ProgramFiles%/pandora_agent). You can change it by pressing Browse…, once correctly indicated press Next:
Wait for the files to be copied. Configure the IP address (or name) of the Pandora FMS server that will receive the agent data and the group to be associated with the agent.
In the next window appears the option to enable the remote configuration. It is important to have it enabled with a 1 to have a copy of the agent in the Pandora FMS server and from there you can 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 selected Run Pandora FMS Agent 7.0NG; otherwise you will have to do it manually, or it will start when MS Windows® is restarted again.
Once this process is finished, the MS Windows® agent is installed, running and reporting on the computer.
Checking the information returned by the agent
Once the MS Windows agent has been started® after its installation, it is time to check what this agent is reporting. To do this, you must know the name under which this agent is going to report. By default the agent is created with the name of the host. You can see the name of the host MS Windows® with the execution of the command hostname in a window with cmd.exe.
Once you know the agent name, the next step is to see if it has been created in Pandora FMS. To do this you have several options. The first one is to search in agent details, inside the group in which the agent has been created, in this example the group Workstations.
A faster and more efficient way to find the agent is to search directly through the Pandora FMS search engine, indicating the agent's name.
By default, the MS Windows® agent comes with several pre-loaded local basic monitoring modules, such as CPU load (CPU Load), % of RAM used (Memory_Used), free space in MB of disks (DiskUsed), etc.
If we need to add new modules to this agent, we can consult the advanced documentation of monitoring with software agents.
You can see graphs generated with the module's data history and a table with the data history from this view by clicking on the marked icons in the following screenshot:
