Being an Infrastructure Engineer in a complex hybrid environment the most valuable thing about Pandora FMS to me is its extensive customization with its Software Agents. Pandora can allow me to write simple Bash or PowerShell scripts on our local servers, output a single value and instantly monitor it as a custom "Module" unlike other tools which lock you into out-of-the-box metrics. Their proprietary Tentacle protocol is also highly valued by me and It ensures that the secure transfer of monitoring data out of our limited on-premise database servers to the main Pandora console are incredibly reliable, without opening a myriad of firewall ports. Moreover, the fact that it can easily accommodate SNMP v3 traps on our Cisco core switches along with the Windows WMI polling lets us have a real single pane of glass. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Learning curve is notoriously steep since the platform uses its own specific terminology (Agents, Modules, Policies) that takes time to learn and The web console interface is very old fashioned and hulky it can be a pain to navigate through multiple sub-menus only to adjust a single alert threshold. Also, it is highly unforgiving on creating mass configurations using their Policies feature. When writing a small regex mistake in defining a module in a policy then it will not apply right to your target servers, and it is a pain to troubleshoot that deployment failure. Finally, major version upgrades on the Pandora server are always very sensitive in terms of MySQL database backups as custom dashboards at times fail during the upgrade. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
