Anyone familiar with setting up Pandora FMS?

[Red Squirrel]

I cannot for the life of me figure out the proper procedure for setting up an agent. I found some documentation but it skips a lot of important details and is very vague.

What steps do I need to do on the server, and what steps do I need to do on the client? Or is there a way to do the steps only in one place and have them replicate? (ex: the modules). I managed to get one semi working but any modules I added arn't working. It's just a big guessing game due to lack of documentation.

 

[tangoseal]

Tell me a little more about this software .... is it as good as Nagios?

Is it easier to use than Nagios?

Do you need a non windows based server to run it?

I am sure you can answer faster than us having to dig through their website right now haha

 

[Red Squirrel]

We use it at work and it's fairly decent. Setting up a Linux agent is usually very easy but now that they changed it to a service based agent I'm just not sure how the new one works. It runs on Linux, which is a plus, but can also monitor windows. Even ESX server (which is basically Linux).

The part I like the most is the fact that each monitor point is based on the output of a command. This opens tons of possibilities to monitor stuff like environmental control devices or output from various software etc.

I played with Nagios a bit but not enough to fully compare it. I'm more familiar with Pandora because I used it at work and it's decent. Only thing is it tends to trigger lot of "agent down" false alarms, but hopefully they fixed that in the newer version.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Ok so I figured it out. Turns out iptables was running and blocking the agent from connecting. Given this is a distro specific for this you'd think they would have opened up the port by default.

Managed to find the service, it was an oddball name: SuSEfirewall2_init and SuSEfirewall2_setup. I then setup my own script to start it so I can set my own rules. Now the agents report. Turns out when you make a new agent it will auto create on the server too.

Now I can tie this in to my environmental monitoring server and monitor temps and stuff. I'm waiting on an arduino board so I can monitor other stuff too like battery voltage and hydrogen levels. This is going to be awesome.