Pandora FMS Interface

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This section shows some of Pandora FMS interface common bases.

At the bottom of the screen, there is the version of Pandora FMS currently used. There are text entry boxes at the center to enter the username and password with the button to log in. The login wallpaper can be customized.

The default credentials are:

• User: admin
• Password: pandora

Once you enter the valid login credentials, the console displays the default Pandora FMS main welcome page. Pandora FMS login screens can be customized. This will be explained in the Custom welcome screen section.

The Pandora FMS default main page shows basic and general information about the status of the systems and the number and type of checks that Pandora FMS performs. When logged in with superadmin rights:

The static elements, which do not change in different screens of the interface are:

• Operation menu
• Management menu
• Defined links
• Header

The dynamic elements which do change in different screens are:

• Header information
  • User information, pending messages, system notifications, etc. (this will be explained in the header sub-section below).
• Site news
• Web console's last activity
• General basic information
• Pandora FMS Overview:
  • Server health Server general status.
  • Monitor health Monitor general status.
  • Module sanity General status of the modules that collect data, compared to the non-started ones.
  • Alert level Alert general status.

This is the default home page, but the user can customize it.

In the Workspace → Edit my user view you can choose the Pandora FMS home screen.

• Default: Pandora FMS main page as shown above by default.
• Visual Console: You can pick the user's visual console.
• Event List: List of events.
• Group View: Agent group view.
• Tactical View: Agent tactical view.
• Alert Detail: Alert list
• Other: Users are able to customize their home page by entering the url that points to the console. For instance, to see the agent detail:

?sec=view&sec2=operation/agentes/estado_agente

• Dashboard: To choose a user dashboard.

Click Update to save changes.

The operation menu allows you to see all checking done by Pandora FMS agents, visual maps, network maps, inventory, see and manage the incidents (if you have the according permissions), see the SNMP console, see the messages and use the extensions.

From the Operation menu down to any submenu, there could be other drop-down elements.

Each of these elements links to other pages containing information and all of them will be explained in the chapters dealing with operation in Pandora FMS in more detail.

You can have access from the menu ►Monitoring → Views → Heatmap view. It allows to visualize, according to its configured elements, and by means of colors, the monitoring in progress.

Clicking on the gear icon you can have access to the settings.

• Refresh: Allows you to set in minutes or seconds the frequency of data refreshment to be displayed.
• Search: Allows you to set a search string by agent name (see search parameters below).
• Type: Group by agents (Group agents, by default), group modules by tag or group modules by module group.
• Depending on the previous selection, different options will be displayed.
• Press the Show button to update the heat map.

The Management menu allows you to view and manage the checks carried out by Pandora FMS agents, the modules and components of said checks, the alerts that these modules and agents can launch and how these alerts work, the existing policies, the users, the user profiles, the Pandora FMS servers and their assigned tasks, the system audit log, the general performance of Pandora FMS web console, the database maintenance and console's extensions.

There could be other elements which will be displayed when selecting menus in any Management submenu.

Each of these elements provides another page with information. All of them will be explained in detail in the chapters of operation and management with Pandora FMS.

The links menu simply displays a link to preconfigured sites. These can be added, modified and deleted from the Pandora FMS Management menu. These links allow you to link Pandora FMS with other WEB applications of your organization and make Pandora FMS a central management point.

Pandora FMS header offers several quick links or direct access to important features of the system and a search bar:

From left to right, the header provides the following:

• The search bar which allows to run a search in several elements: agents, reports, alerts, maps, combined graphs, users and / or policies in Pandora FMS database.

• The auto-refresh button which, apart from updating the screen, can be configured to auto-refresh in a certain time interval. This allows you to configure it to be refreshed every X time on any page. By doing this, the session or the information in it will not get lost. It also displays the updated data.
• If there are pending system notifications, an alert icon will be displayed and by clicking on it, a modal window with the current alerts will be displayed.

• A link to the system status, which shows Pandora FMS server status.
• A link to the general support of Pandora FMS.
• A link to the general contextual help content of Pandora FMS.
• Information about the logged in user, a direct link to its user page (between curly brackets).
• A button to log out.
• If you have messages yet to be read, an icon of an envelope will be shown. The drop-down will show a modal window with the available messages.

The link to the system status also alerts you when a service is down, changing icon:

By clicking on the link, it takes you directly to the server status, reporting different details about them:

In the user editing section, you may configure the auto-refresh for certain sections. If enabled in this section, the auto refresh button allows you to update the page by clicking on it, or select an update frequency:

Once this has been activated, the remaining time until the next update will be shown next to the link name:

Auto refresh is only shown on some pages. It is disabled on other pages by default to avoid conflicts and losing data when editing forms. The pages where it is allowed are:

• Tactical view
• Group detail
• Agent detail
• Alert detail
• Monitor detail
• Service view
• Dashboard
• Event view
• SNMP trap console
• Network map
• Cluster view
• Graph view
• Visual consoles

In the search bar, by just entering a couple of letters, you are shown a fast access with a single click to the components that match the entered letter or text string.

In addition, the search bar allows looking for terms in policies, visual consoles, reports, graphs, users, alerts, modules or agents when entering a text string and pressing Enter. A summary of the found elements is shown. The information is classified in tabs for each type of data, with the agent tab pre-selected:

You may click on any any tab to see the rest of the categories, if there were any search results..

In Pandora FMS, there are several icons, whether text-side icons or icons together with other icons, etc. Usually speaking, when hovering the mouse over them for a certain amount of time you are shown a text tag showing its name and/or function. Here you have the most important ones explained.

The Contextual Help Icon gives you general help on the field it comes with or in the application form or page where it is located. It opens a pop up window (pop-up windows must be enabled in your browser) and provides full help.

It can also be represented in other ways:

The suggestion and advice icon provides you with some help on the field it comes with. It is shown by placing the cursor over it.

The management icon comes with some lines in some tables. It represents a direct link to the element's configuration. To have access to the linked page, click on it.

It is present in mainly visual sections to display information in full-screen mode by hiding the menus.

The magic wand icon indicates that this feature will be useful to easily apply (via an assistant) to a large number of items an action.

It is used to remotely edit the configuration file of the software agents.

Pandora FMS remote checking has an update interval, but this could be forced by clicking on the button.

Once the force update icon has been clicked, it changes to show that it has been activated. It returns to its usual state once the checking has been updated.

Almost all Pandora FMS images have an alternative text which is shown when hovering over it with the mouse pointer. You can obtain alternative textual information as well as the image information.

Server detailed view is used to know, besides the general status of the Pandora FMS servers, their load level and execution delay.

In this view, you may see different information on each column:

• Name: Generally the hostname of the machine is used.
• Status: (green = active, gray = stopped or down).
• Type: Data server, network server, etc.
• Version: It shows the current version of Pandora FMS server.
• Modules: Number of modules of this type executed by the server regarding the total number of modules of this type.
• Lag: Highest time that the oldest module is waiting to receive data / Number of modules that are out of their life time. This indicator is used to know if there are too many modules and to know if the server is at the limit of its load capacity. Delayed modules indicates the number of modules that have not reported to the server.
• T/Q (Current threads/queued modules currently): It shows the number of threads currently active on each server. Total number of modules in queue waiting to be attended. These parameters reflect status of excessive load. There should almost never be modules queued, this reflects the inability of the server to process data.
• Updated: Each server has a “Keepalive” that updates its status, to make sure it is active, also updating its statistics.
• OP.: Available operations, icon column.

Some icons have special relevance:

• Poll request: It requests the remote test server to execute all the checks it has, forcing it to execute them again. Valid for all network servers, e.g. Network server, WMI server, Plugin server, WEB Server, etc.
• Edit: Change IP address and server description. recon server tasks.
• Delete: Delete the server.
• Edit remote server configuration: Edit server remote configuration. Valid for Pandora FMS or Satellite server servers.
• Manage Discovery tasks: Manage Discovery tasks. Suitable for Discovery servers.

Agents contain modules with the different checks that are carried out. Their status could be:

• OK: Green.
• Warning / Notice: Yellow.
• Critical: Red.
• Unknown: Grey.
• Not started: They cannot be seen. They only appear in blue in the management view.

This would be the agent data view, which are called Modules in Pandora FMS. It shows the module name, its status (in a colored box) and its numeric or alphanumeric value.

There is also the detailed agent view. This view quickly summarizes the agent's overall status and the summarized status of the modules. We can see several agents in different states in this view:

Agents will portrait in their status the worst situation of its modules, so it there is only one in critical state, the agent will be red.

As before, the group view summarizes the status of all agents. A group could have one of the following states:

• OK (green): All agents are working properly.
• Warning/Notice (yellow): At least one agent of this group is in a 'warning' status.
• Critical (red): At least one agent is in a 'critical' status.
• Unknown (grey): All agents of this group are in 'unknown' status.
• Without Modules (white): When the agents of a group do not have modules or if they are not initialized.

This view provides a list which contains all modules of all agents. The list shows the status of all modules using the same color coding as described above.

This view is very useful for comparing module information from different agents thanks to its filtering options.

On some pages under Pandora FMS, you may see something like this:

This widget starts searching as you are typing and displays the agents which correspond to the characters you typed in. The color coding of the results are:

• First block in green: The agents matching by name.
• Second block in yellow: The agents matching by description.
• Third block in purple: The agents matching by address.

Given the special importance of communications through the network interfaces of the devices to be monitored, Pandora FMS has a separate table to describe them.

This table can appear in places such as an agent overview, the detail view of an agent in the tree view, certain report types, etc. As its name indicates, it displays information about the network interfaces of a given agent.

There are some ways this table might be shown:

• Recon script: This script will create agents and modules prepared to properly show the information in case of being network interface modules.
• SNMP interfaces wizard: Through a simple setup, this assistant, which is located in the agent's setup view, will show the found interfaces and the only thing left to do is choosing the modules to be created. The module ifOperStatus is required to see the interface in the table. To view the input and output traffic graph, the modules ifInOctets and ifOutOctets are also required.
• Manual creation: To display the interface on the table, a module should be created following certain naming conventions. This module should be called <interface name>_ifOperStatus and should be of one of these types: remote_snmp_proc, remote_icmp_proc, remote_tcp_proc and generic_proc. It is recommended to use the remote_snmp_proc type and attack the ifOperStatus OID of the interface (.1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.8.<index>) to get its real status. To view the input and output traffic graph, two modules of remote_snmp_inc type and called <interface name>_ifInOctects_ and <interface name>_ifOutOctets_ should be created. These modules should attack the OID .1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.10.<index> and .1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.16.<index>, respectively. To show the IP and the MAC of the interface on the table, it is necessary to add this data to the above mentioned ifOperStatus module's description.

Operation menu:

• Monitoring → Views
  • Tactical view
  • Group view
  • Tree view
  • Agent detail
  • Monitor detail
  • Interface view
  • Tag view
  • Alert details
  • Heatmap view
  • Module groups
  • Real-time graphs
  • Agents/Alerts view
  • Agent/Module view
• Topology maps
• Reporting
• Events
• Favorite (NG 770 version or later)
  • Visual Console
  • Reporting
  • Network map
  • Modules
  • Log viewer
  • Groups
  • Events
  • Dashboard
  • Agents
• Workspace
• Tools
  • Export data
  • Scheduled downtime
  • File repository

Management menu:

• Discovery
• Resources
  • Manage agents
  • Custom fields
  • Component groups
  • Module categories
  • Module types
  • Module groups
  • Operating systems
  • Netflow filters
  • Insert Data
  • Resource exporting
  • Resource registration
• Profiles
  • Manage agent groups
  • Module tags
  • Enterprise ACL Setup
  • Manage users
  • Profile management
• Configuration
• Alerts
• Servers
  • Manage servers
  • Manage database HA
  • Plugins
  • Export targets
  • Manage Satellite Server
• Setup
• Admin tools
• Links
• Warp Update
• Module library
• About

The group view is a table with the groups of each Instance and the following information about each one:

• Group name. In the first place there is the All group, if secondary groups are being used it will have an informative icon.
• Agent total number.
• Group status (the worst status among its agents).
  • Number of agents in Unknown status.
  • Number of agents in Non initialized status.
  • Number of agents in Normal status.
  • Number of agents in Warning status.
  • Number of agents in Critical status.
• Status of these modules.
  • Number of modules in Unknown status.
  • Number of modules in Non initialized status.
  • Number of modules in Normal status.
  • Number of modules in Warning status.
  • Number of modules in Critical status.
• Number of alerts fired.

It has a Force button that, when pressed, forces the corresponding group to be updated. Clicking on each number displays directly, in a new screen, the agents or modules in the corresponding status column. For example, clicking on number 4 in the Modules (Warning) column and the Servers row:

By clicking on the group name you may enter the Group Tactical View:

This view shows a general status of the agents in the selected group. You may also add the group as a favorite by clicking on the star icon next to the selected group name.

To have a full overview of the modules and their agents, use the Monitor detail view (Monitoring → Views). Its main purpose is to search by group, monitor status, group the module belongs to or by tags.

Within the advanced options you may choose the type of server or the type of data handled by each module, among other filtering properties. No matter how many search combinations you need, you may always save each filter (Load filter and Save filter buttons) to be reused as many times as necessary.

When loading each filter you may check it as a favorite using the star icon right next to the header. Monitor detail's favorite filters have their own section called Modules in the Operation menu for quick and customized access for each user with this tool.

The Favorite menu has no items by default and therefore it is not displayed. As the user adds their favorite options, each of the following submenus will be enabled:

• Visual Console
• Reporting
• Network map
• Modules
• Log viewer
• Groups
• Events
• Dashboard
• Agents

That way, users may add (or remove) access to the most frequently used functions (Favorite) and work efficiently and smoothly.

These are resources used to mass deploy scripts or plugins to be used in Software Agents, monitoring policies on agents and Satellite servers. It is accessed from the menu Configuration → Collections.

To create a new file collection, click on Create:

Fill in the name, group, short name and description and click Create.

To add resources to a collection, go back to the collection list and click on the name of the collection resources will be added to.

In the three icons highlighted in the image above, from left to right you may create a directory, create a text (which you may then edit) or store a new file.

Once the resources have been added, return to the collection list of and an icon with a yellow triangle will appear, where you may click to synchronize the changes with the different Pandora FMS elements (agents, Software Agents, monitoring policies and Satellite servers).

Each collection has its own base directory. In the Web Console these are stored in the directory /pandora_console/attachment/collection with a name like fc_XXX, where XXX is the numeric ID of the collection. File collections can contain subdirectories. File collections are transferred as ZIP (compressed) files to the Agent through Tentacle. File collections are only supported with Tentacle transfer mode.

Go to Resources → Manage agents and click on the name of a Software Agent. Click on the Collection tab. You will have a list of available collections similar to this one:

To add a collection click on the plus icon in the Add column:

If you see an icon with a yellow warning triangle in the Status column, either the collection is empty or the collection has not been synchronized. If the collection contains files or directories, click on the yellow icon. Once you have applied the changes, the status of the collection will indicate the success of the synchronization.

After a few minutes you may go to Configuration → Collections and click on the name of the added collection. The newly added Software Agent will be displayed in the Agents tab.

Each file collection has a short name; for this example fc_13830334393. This means that the utilities, scripts or executables that are inside the collection will be in:

%ProgramFiles%\pandora_agent\collections\fc_13830334393

It is important to know that the collection is compressed to be sent to the Software Agent, so the latter must have the unzip.exe tool in order to decompress the file. As of version 3.2 of the Agent, this utility is installed inside:

%ProgramFiles%\pandora_agent\utils

You need to know this to be able to use Modules that work when working with those files, so that you may specify the full “real” path. Each file collection is stored at a different address, to prevent different file collections from overwriting or overlapping each other.

The collection control system is based on md5 hashes, similar to Agent configuration file management. When creating the collection in Pandora FMS Web Console, an md5 hash is created and sent to the Software Agent. This md5 will only be updated when there are changes in Pandora FMS Web Console collection, and not in the Software Agent. Therefore, the changes in the collections made locally in the agents will remain as long as the collection is not modified in the Web Console.

If any change is made in the collection in the Web Console side, the md5 will be recalculated, and when it does not match the existing one in the Agents, it will apply the last colelction configuration, overwriting the previous one and deleting possible local modifications on the collections.

If you want to use a Module that uses a file included in the collection, reference only the directory that contains the collection, using its fixed identifier. This is an example using a plugin Module:

It works much like individual Agent collections, but instead of applying a collection to a specific Agent, it is applied to a policy:

Refer to this section to manage and synchronize collections.

Click on the Servers → Manage servers menu and then click on the remote configuration icon of the Satellite server the collection will be added to. Click on the Collections tab and in the list of available collections, in the Actions column, add the respective collection by clicking on the + icon. You may also delete the collections added by clicking on the trash can icon.

When you save the changes, after a few minutes, you will see in the configuration file the new section created with the collections added and their respective short name.

Refer to this section to manage and synchronize collections.

From Pandora FMS 729 OUM you may centralize collection management from the Metaconsole. To access it go to the Centralised management → Agent management menu and click on the Collections tab.

Refer to this section to manage and synchronize collections, as they work similarly as those of the Web Console.

The Configuration duplication option allows copying pandora_agent.conf file from a Software Agent with remote configuration enabled to another Software Agent.

• Use Source Group to filter agents by the group they belong to.
• Select the agent that contains the configuration to be copied to the Source Agent.
• Select one or more agents in Destination agent(s).
• Press the button Replicate configuration to apply the changes.

In the Servers → Manage Satellite Server menu you may manage the Satellite servers that you pointed to your Web Console. By clicking on the name you may manage the corresponding Credential boxes.

• The Plugin Server must be enabled.
• In a PFMS Web Console it allows to display the list of registered plugins, as well as their creation, modification and deletion.
• If the Console is a node, you will only be able to list the registered plugins and you will have to go to the corresponding Metaconsole to manage them.

With the Add button you may add new plugins and with the icon you may edit them.

Access attachments in collections with the icon . In this section you have similar options for deleting, editing and downloading. From version 769 onwards, it also has a button to see and copy the full path of attachments or plugins.

See the guidelines for developing server plugins in the Technical Reference section.

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