Lead Image © Endrille, Fotolia
Monitor your network
Pandora's Box
The Pandora Flexible Monitoring Solution (FMS) [1] is a full-featured network monitoring system. It equips system and network administrators with an information-rich dashboard that they can use to monitor all kinds of servers within their networks. Additionally, the Pandora FMS administration interface allows you to quickly identify and take stock of areas that are in critical need of attention.
With its wide array of capabilities and reporting tools, Pandora FMS edges out the competition. However, while it is relatively easy to set up, you'll need to spend some time familiarizing yourself with its interface. Although it isn't the most intuitive monitoring server out there, you'll soon learn your way around the interface's nooks and crannies.
Pandora FMS is available in two flavors: an open source community edition and an Enterprise version that differs in terms of price and features [2]. In this tutorial, I'll stick to the freely available open source edition, which does a nice job of showcasing the monitoring server's features.
Pandora FMS is developed in Perl. While the community edition uses the MySQL database, the Enterprise edition uses the Percona Server for MySQL. Written in PHP, the web console is a multi-tenant service that can be accessed by multiple users with different profiles.
Roll Out the Server
While you can deploy Pandora FMS on all kinds of operating systems, including Windows, Linux is its preferred environment. Also, while CentOS 7 is its distribution of choice, the project has installation packages for Debian and SUSE Linux as well.
The monitoring server doesn't have very high resource requirements. For a small test, you can make do with a single-core 2GHz server with 4GB of RAM and a 40GB hard disk. With this environment, you can monitor
...
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy ADMIN Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Related content
-
Monitor Windows systems and Linux servers
The Microsoft Operations Management Suite provides a comprehensive monitoring solution in the cloud that offers a high degree of flexibility and scalability. -
Migrating to Azure Monitor Agent
The replacement for the Log Analytics Agent has improved security and cost efficiency, better manageability, and greater reliability – and you must migrate to this new solution by the end of 2024. -
Mobile PC Monitor
Monitoring your internal server environment just became easier with MMSOFT Design’s Mobile PC Monitor software.
-
Monitor Active Directory with Azure AD Connect Health
Microsoft cloud service Azure Active Directory Connect Health supports monitoring of Active Directory, especially in large and distributed environments, but the tool is also useful for monitoring hybrid landscapes using Azure Active Directory. -
Windows Server 2016 for small servers
Small businesses often do not need the full-blown version of Windows Server 2016. If the application scenarios are manageable, the cheaper Essentials version is the ideal solution; however, it does come with a number of restrictions.
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Most Popular
Support Our Work
ADMIN content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you've found an article to be beneficial.
