Differences between Templates, Policies and Massive Operations

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These three concepts may seem similar but they work differently and their goals are very different as well. In this section their differences and correct use will be explained.

Templates allow you to create a set of remote modules easily. When you apply a template the modules are created inside the agent, in no case deleting or removing the existing modules. If after applying a template you modify it, the changes will appear in the following applications, if the agent already has the modules and you reapply them, the modules will be created again. In addition to creating modules on existing agents, in Pandora you can use templates to create modules automatically by executing a Recon Task. Applying templates is done through the Pandora web console.

• When you need to create new remote modules in agents quickly.
• When you need to create new remote modules in agents discovered by a Recon Task.

Policies are an easy way to manage thousands of agents. They contain all the information to manage (create, remove and modify) any monitoring element of your Pandora agents. In a policy you define modules, alerts, file collections, inventory modules and the agents on which the policy will be applied. The first difference between policies and templates is that policies support all kinds of modules, in addition to alerts and file collections. The second difference is that policies can update the agents, deleting and modifying each component configured in the policy. The policies are applied by the Pandora FMS server which creates, deletes and modifies the elements defined in the policies on each agent defined by the same policy.

• When you need to monitor a huge amount of devices easily.
• When you want to fix monitoring parameters for a huge amount of devices.

Massive Operations allow you to perform operations on agents, modules, users, alerts, or policies in a massive way. As you can see the main difference between Massive Operations, Templates and Policies is that Massive Operations are a tool to manage the different components of Pandora including agents, alerts, policies, modules, etc. They are very useful when you want to perform the same change on a huge amount of agents, alerts, modules, etc. For example, moving a group of agents.

Massive operations could be used, for example, to change the action in all alerts to send an email to the same person or, for example, to change the maximum and minimum values for the module CPU usage in all agents.

Massive operations are operations or actions performed through the Pandora web console on each monitoring component such as: agents, modules, alerts, policies, etc.

• When you want to perform the same change in a huge amount of elements (agents, alerts, policies, modules, etc).

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