For our June “Staff Pick” Project of the Month, we selected Pandora FMS, a flexible monitoring system ready for big environments. Sancho Lerena and Axel Amigo, the people behind the project shared some thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.

SourceForge (SF): What made you start this?
Pandora FMS (PF): First of all I would like to thank you for this opportunity! We are very excited to be part of the selected projects for June.

Back in 2003, Sancho Lerena (current CEO of Ártica ST, vendors of Pandora FMS) was working as a senior specialist consultant in one of the biggest banks of Spain. He found that the in-place monitoring lacked several aspects, and a lot of time and human resources were being spent because of it. One year later, in August 2004, the first public version was published (v 0.8).

SF: Has the original vision been achieved?
PF: Yes, and much more. In almost 12 years, we’ve improved a lot from our first approach. Now we know that “monitoring” today involves much more than classical servers or network: now we are talking about ITOM, BAM and APM. Pandora’s capabilities today are far from those of the first version, and we will continue improving our vision and features with each version.

SF: Who can benefit the most from your project?
PF: Pandora FMS is an all-purpose monitoring solution, focused on ITOM, APM and BAM mainly. It can be used by Open Source users who want to monitor a Raspberry, to SMB’s with a small datacenter, and even MSP’s to provide monitoring as a Service (MaaS). And also in a pure on-premise deployment in huge companies like Rakuten- that’s one of our best success stories.

SF: What core need does Pandora fulfill?
PF: ITOM, APM and BAM: Which means IT operation infrastructure, application performance monitoring, and business activity monitoring. In IT we love acronyms

SF: How can we get the most out of using Pandora?
PF: We are SO Open Source, we have a really big documentation available online, videos, tutorials, quicksteps and easy ways to install. We also are now offering a free Pandora FMS training + certification to companies which want to offer Pandora FMS Opensource as base for their services. More information [http://pandorafms.org/en/community/Affiliate-business-program]

SF: What has your project team done to help build and nurture your community?
PF: We’ve always listened through our forums, and recently we’ve opened an Ambassador program [http://pandorafms.org/en/community/ambass] to allow the power users of the Open Source edition with a dedicated site on the web.

SF: Have you all found that more frequent releases helps build up your community of users?
PF: In fact, yes. More releases means more features and improvements and new technologies to monitor, which increases the size of the community.

SF: What was the first big thing that happened for your project?
PF: Our biggest challenge was to deploy Pandora FMS in Rakuten (see Rakuten case study), it was a very complex scenario with almost 10,000 devices.

SF: What helped make that happen?
PF: We absolutely owe this big success to our most loyal Partner: Rworks, from Japan. Without their invaluable help, we would not have stood a chance. They also developed the code, so this is a cooperation in all levels: commercial and in development.

SF: How has SourceForge and its tools helped your project reach that success?
PF: SourceForge for us is the main platform for Open Source distribution, which has helped us reach millions of users throughout our history.

SF: What is the next big thing for Pandora FMS?
PF: We are introducing a new version this year, which will adopt the “rolling-release” cycle, that will allow us to add more features to the product more frequently, without the need for tedious migrations.

SF: How long do you think that will take?
PF: We will start releasing RC versions in Q2 this year, with the final stable version planned for mid Q3.

SF: Do you have the resources you need to make that happen?
PF: Absolutely yes! Thanks to our community and our clients, we are a 10 year old solid Software company.

SF: If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently for Pandora?
PF: As with many software projects, we would like to have more automated tests from the beginning. Sometimes you leave that as a TO-DO task, and building a testing framework of a legacy project takes a lot of time and resources.

[ Download Pandora FMS ]