Pandora Free Monitoring System
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This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (October 2007) |
| Pandora FMS | |
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 Pandora FMS Agent General Information |
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| Developed by | Ártica ST |
| Latest release | 1.3.1 / April 30th 2008 |
| OS | Linux |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | http://pandora.sourceforge.net/ |
Pandora Free Monitoring System (Pandora FMS) is a free software set of programs, licensed under the GNU General Public License that allows the monitoring in a visual way the status and performance of several parameters from different operating systems, servers, applications and hardware systems such as firewalls, proxies, databases, web servers or routers.
Pandora FMS can be deployed in almost any Operating System, an agent is available for each platform and also it can monitor hardware systems with TCP/IP stack, as Load balancers, routers, switches, printers or firewalls.
Pandora FMS has four main components: Pandora FMS Servers (Pandora Data Server, Pandora Network Server, Pandora SNMP Console), Pandora FMS Agents, Pandora FMS Web Management System (Web Console) and Pandora Database.
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[edit] Components
[edit] Pandora Servers and SNMP Console
In Pandora FMS architecture servers are the core of the system, as they are the recipients of bundles of information and the generators of monitoring alerts. It's possible to have different modular configurations for the servers: several servers for very big systems or a single server. Servers are developed in Perl and work under any platform with the required modules. Its native platform is Linux. Servers are also responsible of inserting the gathered data into Pandora's database. It's possible to have several Pandora Servers connected to a single Database.
[edit] Web console
Pandora's user interface allows to manage the monitoring system and to operate with it. It is developed in PHP and leans on a Data Base and a Web Server, being able to work in any platform: Linux, Solaris, Microsoft Windows, AIX and others. Several Web Consoles can be deployed in the same system.
[edit] Agents
They are daemons or services that can monitor any numeric parameter, boolean status, strings or numerical incremental data and/or condition. They can be developed in any language (as Shellscript, WSH, Perl or C). They run on any type of platform (Microsoft, AIX, Solaris, Linux, IPSO, Mac OS or FreeBSD), also SAP, because the agents can communicate with the Pandora FMS Servers to send data in XML using SSH, FTP, NFS, Tentacle (protocol) or any data transfer mean.
[edit] Database
This is the core module of Pandora. Here resides all the information of the system. For example, all data gathered by agents, configuration defined by administrator, events, incidents, audit info, etc is stored in the database At this moment, only MySQL database is supported. More databases system support is planned to be added in the future.
[edit] New architecture
Pandora FMS's new architecture, as of version 1.3, is formed up into four main components:
[edit] Web console
Pandora's user interface. The user controls and operates the system with it. Several Web consoles can be implemented in a single system. The Web console is written in PHP, and it lies on top of a database and a Web server. It is compatible with any platform - (Microsoft, AIX, Solaris, Linux, IPSO, FreeBSD, SAP, etc). The official supported platform is Linux. The console allows the user to control the status of the agents, view statistical information, generate graphs and data tables and also keeps a system incident control. Moreover, it is able to generate reports and change the alerts, agents and user profile settings.
[edit] Servers
There are four different servers
- Core server (called Data Server), is the receptor of the data packages and generates the alerts.It is the brain of the system. Several servers can work alongside for larger systems. The core server access Pandora database, which is shared with the Web server, and stores the processed data packages. This Server is executed as a daemon, and processes the packages stored in its file system. Data are generated by the system agents. Despite the server's low system resources consumption and simple installation and operation, the core server is the most critical element of the system. The core server receives and processes the produced data, and fires the alerts and the events.
- Network Servers monitorize remote systems using network resources like ICMP, TCP, UDP or SNMP Queries. Network Servers are acting themselves as "Network Agents". This server fires the alerts and the events for this modules.
- Recon Server, that sweeps networks detecting new systems on it.
- SNMP Server receives and processes the snmp traps, and fires the alerts associated to it.
[edit] Central database
Pandora FMS only supports MySQL. The central database keeps all the information Pandora needs to work - agent data, settings, user information, incidents, system settings, etc. The system can use a MySQL cluster to store the information, or a High Availability (HA) solution for larger systems. This database can work with any of the platforms officially supported by MySQL. Pandora FMS can be implemented with MySQL versions from 4.0 to 5.0, although the latest one is recommended.
[edit] Agents
They collect all the system's data. They are executed in each local system, although they can also collect remote information by installing monitoring systems for the agent in several different machines - called satellite agents.
They have been developed to work under a specific platform, making use of the specific tools of the used language: ShellScripting for Unix - which includes Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and BSD, as well as the Nokia's IPSO. Pandora agents can be developed in virtually any language, given its simple API and being open source. Windows agents are developed in a free development environment for C++ and uses the same interface and modularity than Unix agents.
They communicate with the servers using SSH, FTP, NFS or an XML container to transport data.
[edit] Releases
[edit] Stable releases
Pandora FMS is stable since 1.0 version.
| Version | Date | Information |
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| 1.3.1 | April 30th, 2008 | New transfer protocol: Tentacle (protocol), new server options |
| 1.3 | October 12th, 2007 | New logo, new recon server |
| 1.2 | December 5th, 2006 | New logo, renamed as Pandora FMS, changed homepage |
| 1.1 | May 13th, 2005 | New agents, console and documentation |
| 1.0 | October 14th, 2004 | First stable release (known as pandoramon) |
[edit] VMWare Image
Pandora Team created an Ubuntu Server 8.04 VMware test image with final version of Pandora FMS 1.3.1. This is a VMWare Workstation 5.x image and could be used with free VMWare Player and free VMWare Server.
It has all the Pandora FMS components installed (Data Server, Recon Server, Network Server, SNMP Console for SNMP Trap reception) and MySQL, Apache2 and PHP with all modules dependencies resolved, including Pear Graph for reporting.
There is also a Linux Pandora FMS Agent 1.3.1 running on this machine, using the "local copy" method to transfer XML data packets to itself.
User/Passwords in this system are:
- Unprivileged user is "pandora" with password "pandora"
- OS "root" user has password "pandora"
- MySQL "root" user has password "pandora"
- Pandora FMS console has user "admin" and password "pandora"
This image can be downloaded here.
