Management Pandora FMS

Monitor your network

Pandora's Box

Use the open source Pandora FMS monitoring server to keep an eye on all the computers and network devices in your realm. By Mayank Sharma

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 several hundred servers without much trouble, as per its official documentation.

The easiest and recommended way to install Pandora FMS is to use the ISO image, which contains a CentOS 7 installation with all the dependencies. You can grab the 1.5GB ISO from the project's website, which you can then use to either install the monitoring server on real hardware or inside a virtual machine (VM) manager, such as VirtualBox.

I recommend testing the monitoring by deploying Pandora FMS inside a disposable VirtualBox VM. But before you do, make sure the VM has a permanent IP address. The best way to do this is to lock the IP address to the MAC address of the virtual network in your network router's configuration. For this tutorial, I'll use 192.168.0.11 as the IP address of the Pandora FMS server.

Once you've earmarked the IP address for the server, you can set about installing it. The setup process is fairly straightforward. Simply boot the ISO image and proceed to the guided setup, which is a standard CentOS installation process available in several languages. While you can go with the default option for most of the steps, pay special attention to the hard drive partitioning step. It is recommended to assign the entire machine to the Pandora FMS server. So make sure you dedicate the entire hard disk to the server and use the option to have the partitions created automatically. Now wait for the installer to copy the files after which it will automatically reboot the computer.

If you wish to install Pandora FMS inside an existing server or inside a Docker container, you can refer to its online guide [3] that details the exact steps for each of the supported installation mechanisms.

Field Agents

In Pandora FMS parlance, an agent is an application that retrieves information from computers and devices in your network that you want to be monitored. Pandora FMS has two types of agents: software agents and remote agents.

Software agents perform checks on a computer's resources, such as its CPU, RAM, storage devices, and more, as well as its installed servers and services, such as Apache web server, MySQL or MariaDB database server, and more. The software agents collect data and send it to the Pandora FMS server in the XML format using one of the supported protocols, namely SSH, FTP, NFS, and more.

On the other hand, remote agents monitor machines on which you can't install the software agents. The remote agents are instead deployed in the Pandora FMS server itself and fetch information from the remote network devices using one or several popular protocols including ICMP, TCP, SNMP, or WMI depending on the device and the type of information you want to retrieve. For more details on remote agents, refer to the official documentation [4].

Deploy Agents

You'll have to manually install the software agents by grabbing the binaries for the latest version from the project's SourceForge page [5] (version 747 at the time of writing this tutorial). The project hosts binaries for Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS, SUSE, and Windows. There's also a source tarball that you can use to install the agent on other distributions, such as Arch Linux.

To install the binary, just download and install it with the distro's package manager, such as Debian's dpkg or CentOS 7's yum.

After the agent is installed successfully, you'll need to configure it to point it to the Pandora FMS server. Irrespective of the distro, all agents keep their configuration file under the /etc/pandora/ directory. You can edit the file by opening it in a text editor as follows:

# nano /etc/pandora/pandora_agent.conf

Scroll through the file and look for the server_ip parameter, which should be located under the General Parameters section. Change the current value to the IP address of your Pandora FMS monitoring server (192.168.0.11 for this tutorial).

Now save the file with Ctrl+O and exit nano with Ctrl+X. You can then run through the gamut of systemctl commands to enable the service to start automatically upon boot and then start it manually with:

# systemctl enable pandora_agent_daemon.service
# systemctl start pandora_agent_daemon.service

You can similarly install agents on all your Linux machines. The installation process for the Pandora agent for Windows machines is fairly intuitive. Keep an eye out for the agent's installation directory, since you'll have to navigate to it to edit the pandora_agent.conf configuration file to point the agent to your Pandora FMS server.

Get Onboard

Once you have installed the agents on all your machines, it's time to fire up the Pandora FMS dashboard. Launch a web browser on any computer in the network and head to http://192.168.0.11/pandora_console (replacing the IP address with the address of the machine where you've installed Pandora FMS). The first time you launch it, the dashboard will perform some housekeeping tasks, such as installing the database schema (Figure 1). When it's done, you can use admin:pandora as the default login credentials.

Figure 1: On first launch, the dashboard will take you through a small configuration wizard to select the language, time zone, and subscription to the update manager service.

The Pandora FMS default landing page (Figure 2) gives you an overview of the Pandora FMS server's condition, as well as the condition of other machines on your network, along with a list of recent activity.

Figure 2: The dashboard has a customizable news board that you can use to share important information with other admins.

The dashboard is divided into three sections. On top is the header that gives you quick access to some of the monitoring server's important features. A prominent part of the header is the search bar that allows you to quickly navigate to various parts of the monitoring server, such as reports, graphs, alerts, users, and more.

If there are any pending system notifications, an alert icon will be displayed in the header. You can click on the icon to view the details about the alerts and take remedial actions. The header also has several links, including a link that shows the Pandora FMS server's status, a link to the online support forums, and another to the project's official documentation.

The most important component of the dashboard is the navigation menu on the left side of the interface, which is divided into two sections. The top six entries make up the operations menu, while the rest are part of the administration menu.

As the name suggests, you can use the operations menu to take stock of the computers that are being monitored by Pandora FMS. The administration menu lets you configure and tweak the different aspects of the monitoring server as per your needs and requirements. For instance, you can view and configure the checks carried out by the individual agents and alter their modules' behavior. Virtually all the entries in both navigation menus have submenus to help you drill down to the exact setting.

Active Agents

Since you've already added agents, your Pandora FMS server should have begun monitoring them. Log into the web dashboard and head to Resources | Manage agents to list all the agents currently being tracked by the Pandora FMS server.

Mouse over an agent in the list to reveal several links (Figure 3). The Edit link will help you tweak the basic details about the computer that was configured automatically by the agent you installed on the machine. Starting with Pandora FMS v7, all agents have an agent name, which acts as a unique identifier and an alias. By default, the agent gets the machine's hostname as the alias and a very large random hexadecimal number as a name or identifier (Figure 4).

Figure 3: You can filter the list of agents by several parameters and even disable or delete them.

You can define various identifying information, such as a device's serial number or the department a computer belongs to, using the Custom fields section. — Figure 4: You can define various identifying information, such as a device's serial number or the department a computer belongs to, using the *Custom fields* section.

The View link will fetch the monitoring details from that particular computer, such as CPU usage, free memory or disk space, and more (Figure 5). Each piece of this information corresponds to a module. You can add or delete modules to an agent as needed.

You can use the icons in the Agent contact section to fetch the data from the agent. immediately without waiting for the specified interval. — Figure 5: You can use the icons in the *Agent contact* section to fetch the data from the agent. immediately without waiting for the specified interval.

When viewing an agent, you get several icons in the top-right corner. There's an icon that'll help you edit the agent details including adding or removing modules. Also useful is the graphs icon that lets you graphically chart the values of the various monitored parameters (Figure 6).

Figure 6: You can pool multiple monitors in one graph or view them separately; you can even export the data as a CSV file.

Keep Tabs

Since the Pandora FMS server is already receiving monitoring data, you should be able to see an overview of the agents on the landing page of the dashboard itself.

The Total agents and monitors section lists the total number of agents and the monitors or resources that are being monitored. Under the Monitors by status section, you'll be able to see a break down of these resources under different color-coded states. For instance, the resources that need your immediate attention are red, while the ones that are operating within the defined limits are green. Mouse over each monitor to get an explanation about the state each color code represents.

You can jump right in and click on the number of critical monitors to get a detailed list of all the resources that require your immediate attention. You'll be shown various details for all the monitors that are in critical state, such as the name of the module and the agent or the computer to which it belongs (Figure 7). You can also use the buttons under the Graph column to chart the monitor's history in order to determine when it went critical. Each entry also has an edit button to help you tweak the values for the monitor in case you determine the default values are too low for your liking.

Figure 7: It's always a good idea to review the default thresholds for all the monitors and tweak them to meet your requirements.

Conclusion

I've barely skimmed the surface of Pandora FMS, considering the fact that its official documentation spans over 1,000 pages and offers over 40 hours of training videos.

However, I have set up the perfect launchpad to help you begin exploring the server's capabilities. Once you've configured the agents and familiarized yourself with the monitors, you can start setting alerts. You can also equip the server with a mail service provider's SMTP settings to receive alerts via email, based on predefined criteria.

The project regularly hosts webinars on its YouTube channel [6] and also offers over 40 tutorial videos to help you get the most out of your installation. Together with the detailed documentation and the forum boards, these invaluable resources help you get acquainted with Pandora FMS and adapt it to your needs.